Farlops Industries

Making the Future Hideously More Complex Since 1963

"Who is this Pace Arko, and what has he got to hide?"

About Me

My name is Pace Arko and I live up on Capitol Hill in Seattle. I am a freelance web accessibility consultant, computer technician and webmaster. I've formally started working on various tiny parts of the Internet in July of 1996 when I took a temporary job at Microsoft. Before that, most of my Internet experience was derived, as an end-user, through CompuServe and electronic bulletin boards.

Other facts and opinions:

Me in my NASA jumpsuit. A befezzed Pace Arko, just before All Saints Day, nearby a bookcase of Middle English scholarship. A common sight, myself in front of a computer.

About My Pseudonym

To be frank this was a defensive measure to protect my privacy and to protect me from myself.

Like many novices in the middle Nineties, I gloried in what I thought to be anonymity on the Internet. This lead to a few early embarrassing web pages and posted comments where I said things I would soon regret. I quickly learned to protect my real identity by using a pseudonym, Corpore Metal, which I derived from the decidedly misanthropic secret society of Greg Costikyan's brilliantly satirical science fiction role-playing game, Paranoia.

Around 1997, being a big fan of ska music, I bought a wonderful compilation of third wave stuff, called Latin Ska Volume Two from the Moon-Ska label. On the compilation, there was a tune called "Mr. Farlops" by a band called Dr. Calypso, a punchy little number! Pretty soon afterwards, I used it as a handle in Warcraft II bashes and, from there, I began to use it all over the Web.

But now I've got to a point where I am willing to own all the stuff I've posted all over the Web under that pseudonym. I will continue to use it, just like Rob Malda still uses Cmdr. Taco, but I will start making appearances under my real name from here in.

About My Proprietorship

Farlops Industries is the name I gave to the business I started in the middle of 2000. I started it while moonlighting at Microsoft. I created the name by basing it on my pseudonym, Mr. Stavros Farlops, which I used when posting outrageous things on Usenet and websites. The name is meant to be pretentious, ironic and memorable.

Currently Farlops Industries isn't incorporated. Maybe it will be in the near future.

I started this business because:

  1. Temporary agencies struck me as useless middle men. More money straight to me!
  2. Big companies wouldn't let me build websites to W3C standards.
  3. I was stagnating as a permatemp at Microsoft. I left to do them and myself a favor.
  4. Sometimes freefall is only way I can make myself do things. So far this has proved accurate.
  5. It taught me more respect for the humble end-users of stuff that I make.

About This Site

Design Principles

I have a very old essay that explains why I've designed this site the way I did. Also, if you read my blog, you'll find many articles on web design. In short, I'm a web standards zealot. I became such in three stages:

  1. In late 1997, I became the webmaster for the Microsoft Accessibility site. Mr. Lowney, then the head of Microsoft's accessibility group, showed me how to design pages so they are more accessible to people with disabilities.
  2. In early 1998, I read Nielsen and Flanders in rapid succession. I began to think about usability very seriously.
  3. In mid 1998, I read Zeldman. I became convinced that CSS was far more elegant than using tables for layout.
From there in accessibility, usability and elegance became my paramount concerns. Microsoft rapid migration from Internet Explorer 4 to Internet Explorer 6, the emergance of Opera and the founding of the Mozilla open source project only reinforced this vision. My fate was sealed.

Subject Matter

Initially when I put this site up back in late 1998, it was meant to be a personal site with no clearly defined subject matter. I was intending to blather about role-playing games, web design, predictions about technology and whatever else caught my fancy.

In spring of 2001, I jumped on the blog bandwagon, by installing Greymatter. Greymatter was a personal content management script that made it easy for me to be as mercurial and detailed as I liked. I could easily write and generate a page on my site whenever I liked. Knowing a little about perl, I quickly began modifying my copy of Grey's code to add more functionality.

Years later, in summer of 2005, several gnawing trends combined to finally prompt me to attempt a major redesign of my site:

  1. My personal business had grown to a point where it really needed a web presence that was more serious than my personal site.
  2. Greymatter's improvements slowed to a crawl. I was very disappointed by the release of 1.3. There was much functionality that other blog scripts had that GM lacked and which hadn't been added.
  3. My CSS layout, highly futuristic and largely unchanged since 1999, began to look long in the tooth. I wanted to switch from the old look to a cleaner, professional look.
  4. Bakafish, finally catching up with me, redesigned his site to be mostly standards compliant and accessible. He also installed Movable Type, which had much of the functionality that I was lustful for.
  5. Years of posting rants on the Internet finally convince me that I should attach my real name to them.

So now my personal site is also my business site. It has to be less deliberately evasive and alienating

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The chief subjects are:

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Unless otherwise noted, copyright Pace Arko 1998-2008, Various rights reserved.
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