History edit
A self-confessed geek, Jason Oakley was born in NSW, Australia in 1971 and has been on the internet since around 1993.
He moved to Newcastle at the start of 1991 and lived there for four years and made many friends, mostly from IRC.
Jason started on the internet with a 28.8k modem and an expensive $5/hr account at OzEmail ISP (now pwned by iiNet).
After visiting Sydney almost every weekend for too many months (mostly for IRC meetups) he finally decided to bite the bullet and move there permanently in 1994. He lived in various suburbs around the Inner West (Marrickville area), moving home about once every year for ten years for various reasons. He had a ball doing volunteer work for a Goth club called "Ritual".
Married in 2001 and divorced at the end of 2005, he moved to west of sunny Brisbane in Queensland in 2006. In 2009 he moved back to Western Sydney. He looks forward to holiday visits from his daughter, Sienna born in July, 2003.
He's been a member of the Efnet IRC community since joining the Internet and has rarely been offline. As of 2006 he hardly goes on IRC at all, mostly living on Twitter via Seesmic and on Facebook.
Originally Christian, he broke out of that and became more like an non-practising eclectic, Neopagan.
Tech Podcasts edit
Tech Webcast records weekly, on Saturdays at lunch time AEST and is also available on iTunes in video and audio formats.
Tech Webcast is now available on the Boxee Box, Popcorn Hour, Roku box, YouTube and Blip.tv:
Jason Oakley is the Video Producer of Tech Webcast.
Jason Oakley has appeared on the Tech Talk Radio which broadcasts live Monday nights at 8pm Australian Eastern time from Melbourne's 3WBC radio station. The show is also streamed live to the internet, is syndicated across Australia and other countries and is also downloadable through the iTunes podcast section.
Hobbies edit
Jason has created voice recordings for LibriVox. So far (February, 2007) he has recorded for a play, some poems and a couple of stories. Check out some of his recordings on Jason's LibriVox page.
He's started doing Voice Acting for animations and computer games.
He volunteers for the Cancer Council.
A popular subdomain on the BlueBilby network is VZ-ALiVE which features information and applications (including emulators) related to the Dick Smith VZ 200, VZ 300 and compatible 8 bit computers. The VZ range of computers were based on the TRS-80 computer and in fact contains the same Microsoft BASIC ROM with some of the routines moved in memory (possibly to escape licensing fees). More details on the website. In 2000, he wrote Arkaball - an Arkanoid clone for VZ200 computers.
MMORPG's he's played include: Everquest (ok), Dark Age of Camelot (meh), Horizons (awful) and World of Warcraft (reasonable) -- although he usually starts playing during their beta phase and soon drops out due to boredom once the game becomes commercial. Also tested a free MMORPG, SilkRoad Online. SilkRoad Online website
Programming edit
Programming is one of his loves and he prides himself in having done some programming in many languages (some you may call scripting) such as: C, Perl, PHP, Bash among others. He wrote a popular game called "Quirl" for the Palm OS (graphics created with TrueSpace 2.0 and music written with ModPlug Tracker -- both by WauloK, himself). The music tracker was licensed from Astraware (Astraware website). Later, an updated version named "Quirl:Christmas Edition" was created, using the same gameplay but with Christmas graphics and sound effects along with a Christmas tune in the background. As of December 2006, this game has become free for download from PalmGear.
These days, he dabbles in PHP from time to time and most recently has written a very popular plugin for the blog application WordPress. The plugin is called "RndImgDisplayer" and displays random images in the WordPress sidebar, automatically calculating width, height and supplying an Alt tag (or alternatively, for Firefox plain text under the image). His second WordPress plugin/widget is called "GPS Mission Stats" which he created while briefly trying out the iPhone GPS Mission application.
Relevant Links edit
Jason Oakley's Voice Actor site
Jason's LibriVox page
Jason's Del.Icio.Us
Jason's Flickr
Jason's Last.FM
Jason's retro VZ200 archive
Tech Talk Radio
Tech Webcast
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