Tracey: I didn’t know you were out there.
Zoe: Sort of the point. Stealth—you may have heard of it.
Tracey: I don’t think they covered that in basic.
– Firefly
I usually look like this online. (Shishin from Guwange)
This is me. Just some guy that does stuff. Some of it neat and important(hah), some of it not. The ratio is extremely subjective, but even I would bet my coin on that latter. You can find me around the interwebs as xiao_haozi usually looking like this ←.
Mutaku was started back in 2006, if I am remembering correctly, as a more permanent internet presence for my projects. I think the domain was officially thrown together in early summer of 2006 (checking back through my whois records). The main idea in searching for a name was to find something that was either not truly a common word or rather a very unique idiom. I started piecing together ideas into words, kind of searching for a portmanteau that I could call my own. Finally, I arrived at Mutaku, here pronounced like `moo-ta-coo`.
The name itself was an amalgamation of two things I was particularly interested in at the time; Mu derived mugen and taku derived from otaku. I know, not too unique when I do the derivations for you. Mugen from Samurai Champloo and otaku, well that doesn’t find itself needing any explanation. Finding Mutaku available, and after some searching and only coming back with a city and band with a similar name, I jumped on it.
For sometime, okay, for years, Mutaku served mainly as a domain name in it’s truest sense, it served as a IP translation for my home network. Eventually, there was a blog that I started shortly after and hosted on a friend’s (Erik @ sublevo) server. I played around with a few different CMS systems, including something of my own, and had finally settled on using Geeklog. I would write up some Linux tutorials from time to time on what were becoming more arcane topics like dial-up and external modems to some simple shell scripts for BASH.
Through the years, I found myself involved in more projects and spreading my wings a bit. I was getting into some web design and coding, moving from scripting to more rigorous programming projects, and playing around with Linux hardware and software on a daily basis. My home network had grown to well over a dozen machines and 3 servers that included running my own private Jabber, IMAP, web, and file servers. I wasn’t becoming a guru, but I was certainly diving into anything I could get my hands on.
Soon, Mutaku as a website, was falling far behind and I found that I no longer like the layout or maintenance routines. After a lot of peer pressure, I tried out WordPress again. Now, I say again because I had used it several times before over the years from 1.* on and never could convince myself to make the switch to something so flashy. I still thought it was a fad. Without going into details, I’m sold.
So here we are, years later and a new Mutaku with new content. I find myself more willing to keep things up to date with the new setup and have, accordingly, begun to try and fill in the gaps with all my projects and collaborations. I still have too large a collection of domains, but consider Mutaku the main branching point for them all.
These days, I’m finishing my PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and have several, what I think are big and neat, projects going along side so Mutaku mostly serves as a front-end to what’s happening around my desk. Therefore, updates will, more often than not, be synopsis relating to these projects. Some of the bigger projects you can find under the associated projects page, however, this is not all inclusive. There are a few big picture items that I am working on with others that are under the radar for now.
I guess the theme is, coming full circle. Mutaku started as a blog, sat mostly stagnant and cluttered with piecemeal ideas, and has now been revived to a blog. Gone are the adsense banners and affiliate links. I find the new site more reflective of what Mutaku was intended to be, my online presence.
Now that I’ve bored you with unimportant details about what Mutaku is and the path it took to the site you are looking at, you probably will never want to come back. However, if for some reason I still have your attention, you can probably understand a little more about me simply by viewing the page lists at the top of the blog.
I’m a scientist in mind, an explorer in heart, and stubborn in all things I find myself doing. If I’m not in lab working on some interesting topics in Mitosis, I enjoy everything from classic arcade games (especially Neo Geo), vegan cooking, reading about history and anthropology or theoretical physics, to puzzles and programming. Most of these (eventually) can be read about at this site in some form or another.
The most pretentious picture I could find of myself. (And it's at a Museum - double yeah!)
If you are still unsure, best to browse around. Please feel free to contact me if anything peaks your interest and you should feel the need to say so.
“Some witty quote.” - some man or woman that’s not me.
Matthew
