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Welcome! My name is Alex, and I would like to thank you for visiting my humble online home. If you would like to know more about my professional skills, then I encourage you to check out my official online Resume and Portfolio or contact me directly for more information. If you're from NASA or SpaceX, the answer is yes. I'll do anything you want.

What's on this site?

So what else can you expect to find here besides my resume and a contact page? Well, I have several hobbies and interests. I like to post stuff about these hobbies and interests to friends and family, but sometimes Facebook just doesn't have a big enough audience to satisfy my online ego. That's what my Blog is for!

On my blog, I post about anything that strikes my fancy that I think others would enjoy. That includes cool facts about the universe and astronomy, technical writing and grammar topics, news about movies and video games, the latest in computer technology, and much more. I realize that spans a wide gamut of topics, but all of those topics interest me, and I may post about all of them! As of late, I haven't been updating it nearly as much as I should be. However, be on the lookout for more posts in the future.

You can probably see that there is one other tab at the top that I haven't mentioned yet: Media. Currently, I'm only hosting some pictures I took on my national park trips. However, this is the place to go to see any significant multimedia updates to the site. The updates could include new photos, videos, and other downloadable materials. When updates are made to this section, I'll be sure to post about it on the blog.

That's it in a nutshell. This site is for professional contacts to view my resume and get in touch with me, and it's for casual visitors looking for interesting media and blog posts. Read on to find out a little more about me and the history of this site.

Tell me more about yourself!

I'm in my late twenties and live in the wonderful state of Ohio. I graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 2008 with a major in Technical & Scientific Communication with subject concentrations in Computer Science and Environmental Science. That major has now been modified slightly and renamed to Professional Writing, but overall it is very similar to the program I went through from 2004-2008. I recently took a new job as a QA analyst at a small company, and have a place to myself close to friends and family. Outside of work and training related to work, most of my free time is spent consuming media of some sort - usually TV, movies, video games, books, and websites. When I can stop downloading things into my brain, I like playing softball and dodgeball, learning about the universe, watching baseball, going to amusement parks, losing money to people in poker, visiting national parks, and spending time with friends and family. Food brings me way more joy than it probably should, but so far I'm not obese.

My life has been shaped by a wonderful family, great friends, and a typical suburban upbringing for those of us from the Midwest in the United States. More recently my worldview has been shaped through scientists and comedians. People like George Carlin, Lewis Black, Louis C.K., Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Hawking have had a major impact on my outlook on life. They have taught me more about the absurdity and beauty of life than anyone else. A sense of humor and knowledge is essential for happiness and success, and those two things make the time we have on our little blue planet more profound than it otherwise would be.

George Carlin Jon Stewart


Neil deGrasse Tyson
Almost everything that Dr. Tyson says is quotable, but I like this one the most and try to take it to heart every day:

"The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, and motivation... it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation. For me, I am driven by two main philosophies: know more today about the world than I knew yesterday, and lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you."

Site History

Over the years, my site has taken on a variety of forms. Around 10 years ago when I was still in high school, I bought this domain, created a basic website, and started posting funny and interesting things that my friends would like. It became pretty popular because of the funny pictures, and it started to grow and consume bandwidth at an incredible pace. However, I eventually backed away from that site as I started my college education. For some reason I felt that I needed a more professional presence on a domain bearing my own name. I like to tell myself that I foresaw the explosion of social media sites like Reddit, which make an idea like my first site obsolete. No one needs a dinky personal site of a friend to find funny stuff on the Internet anymore, although it did well in an era where most people still used Windows 98 and Facebook and YouTube didn't exist yet.

I moved on to a site that had my basic resume, but of course I couldn't keep it focused on only the "professional" aspect. I also had a page that showed my gaming resume. Yes, I played Unreal Tournament 2004 "professionally" for a few years. I did get quite good and earned enough high place finishes to get a pretty substantial total of cash and prizes. However, it turns out that only a couple people in the world can really be professional video game players, so I bowed out of the ultra competitive world of gaming and play games just for fun these days.

Shortly after graduating from college, I created a new site with the help of a couple of my technical writing friends. It was a place where we kept a blog on topics related to technical communication and offered our services to anyone who needed them. That stayed online for a few years, but it never gained the traction we were hoping for.



That leads us to the present day with this iteration of the site. I hope you enjoy the site, and please feel free to contact me with any inquiries or suggestions.







©AlexGrantz.com 2012. Wordpress used for blog and content management.