The Home Page of Randal L. Schwartz at 04:04:17 19-Mar-2024

Welcome to my personal page. Most of my life is spent doing some of the following:
Working
I'm the primary person to blame for Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.
Hanging out online
I frequent the Usenet Perl newsgroups, the Perl mailing lists, a bunch of other mailing lists, IRC Perl channels, and the Perl monastery.
Writing
I write books and magazine articles, primarily about Perl.
Cruising
I've been on every Geek Cruise so far.
Taking pictures
I've got about 40,000 pictures online here, although I'm slowly moving them to my Flickr account.

Am I related to any other famous Schwartz folks?

Not likely. My grandfather changed his name from Von Schraeder to Schwartz when he came from Germany to the US mid-West around 1900. My dad thinks it was to avoid any constabulary entanglement. So, I'm stuck with a hard-to-pronounce name that has a consonant-to-vowel ratio of 7.0. I'd change it back to Von Schraeder, but that would probably just confuse people now.

I'm a western-European mutt, with about 30% German, and the rest a mix of English, Scot, and Irish.

Mariel and me: twins!

I've discovered that the actress Mariel Hemingway was born on the same day as me, and only one state over (in Mill Valley, California). But does she ever write me or call me? Nooooooooo.

Well, at least not until her personal assistant was kind enough to pass along my invitation to my (our) 35th birthday party, and Mariel replied by sending me a very nice autographed picture and a postcard (scan forthcoming). Mariel also asked for an autographed copy of my book in exchange, which I sent. Now to finish editing the video shot at our party...

My travel schedule

For the past 15 years or so, I've been on the road about 20 weeks a year, accumulating over a million frequent flyer miles. See my plan file, which should contain my travel schedule if I've been following my own plan.

Gogopuffs

I've got the word gogopuffs here just so Google can find it, and then later I can say "Google for Gogopuffs" and hit my page.

If you don't get that, you've not watched the ads for breakfast cereal during the Saturday morning cartoons.

Contacting me

You can reach me at merlyn@stonehenge.com. You can also call the office, but I'd much rather be reached by email.