Hello! My name is Ken Schmidt and you have somehow stumbled upon my webpage. It first went up on May 1, 1996, and I've slowly been improving it. Watch this space for more since I'll still be adding on as I get the urge to tinker. It seems that in the year 2001, I've spent more time trimming stuff out of my webpage than adding to it. I hope that doesn't indicate an implosion of things that interest me. Ah well, maybe I'll put more work into it...eventually.
I was born in Lawton, Oklahoma. (Fort Sill, actually.) My family moved back to Mishawaka, Indiana (where my parents were from) before I was 6 months old. I continued to live there until I headed off to Indiana University in Bloomington. About 6 months after graduating from Indiana, I moved to where I am now in Indianapolis (here's a link to another Indianapolis page!)
Anyway...
I used work at Que Education & Training (note that Que E&T was axed from the Pearson family, so this link may not work for long). It's an imprint of the former MacMillan Computer Publishing, (now Pearson Education) based in Indianapolis.
side note: Don't let anyone tell you different, a 5 minutes drive to work is the best benefit you can hope for. Throw out pay (sort of) and benefit packages, they all pale to a short drive that avoids any and all congested traffic areas. end side note
I changed imprints at MCP (a.k.a. Pearson Education) and now I work at BradyGAMES and help make strategy guides for computer and video games. I've written a few, so I feel famous. For small values of famous, anyway.
While I'm at work, I like to listen to my CD player. I normally listen to Alice in Chains, or Saturday Morning Cartoon's Greatest Hits, School House Rock! Rocks, any mid-80s hip hop or some alternative bands. Actually, if you take away Country-Western and its offshoots, there isn't any sort of music I dislike. I only buy certain records, but I'll listen to about anything and usually enjoy it.
If you get a chance, go check out Johnny Socko. They are a wonderfully fun band to go see live (it has been a while since their last show!), and they make it all over the country eventually. Check their tour date page to see when they'll be in an area near you!
While at home, I spend some time watching a few tv shows. Not too many, though. Mostly the educational type stuff: History Channel, TLC, Discovery, and Food Network.I also play on my NES. Yes, that's right. The 8-bit NES. I play two games to death on that machine and have really basic pages up for.
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Until I put my various stories I have written for both The Legion of Net.Heroes and for alt.toys.transformers here, check out the links to the respective newsgroups.
That depends on just who you ask, really...
Back in 1991 I had a job at Indiana University's Computer Science department. They gave me a few accounts so I could stay in touch with e-mail, but I soon found out about Usenet news, and alt.comics.lnh.
I read the group for maybe 2 days (or was that minutes? I forget now) and knew I had to be a part of it. I had been reading comics since 6th grade and loved what the group did. I don't read comics much anymore due to what has happened to my favorite characters (ask me about the Game of Spades Being Played Outside the Comic Universe sometime) and not being able to keep up with all of the rebooting going on. I still will read my old favorites such as a good chunk of Claremont's X-men, Giffen/Macguire Justice League, and Ostrander/Yale/O'donnell/et. al's Suicide Squad. Anyway, at the time I read comics and that lead to my creation of my very fist net.persona...
The villanous
I met a great group of people who introduced me to many, many ways of wasting time while being on-line. The Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was a great way to work on ideas for stories with other people, I got to play Comics jeopardy, and there I met Eagle. (and got him into reading LNH stories, I'm not sure if he's forgiven me for that yet)
Then one day I needed to talk with Dave Van Domelen about a story, but he told me that he turned off talk requests, and didn't do IRC, I had to reach him at something called a MUSH. It actually took me a while to warm up to MUSHing, but in time, I was hooked. Which is now past tense. I really don't play on them anymore, except to pop in and say hi.
Are you asking where all the pretty pictures and noises and backgrounds are? The answer is: I am not using them on my top page, graphics are on some other pages I've done (like most of my character links). The internet should be a place to make your brain work, to trade thoughts, ideas and information, not to shut it off and simply look and listen. Pictures should be used to augment the text, not replace it entirely.
Hey, what do you think? Drop me a line here and let me know what you think. Since I'm tired of junk e-mail, I'll leave it to you to piece my e-mail address together.