Toby over at Toby Geeks Out brought my attention to an event hosted by Robert Birming called Knowember. The premise is simple: Bloggers create a page, add a photo, and answer three questions about themselves. I figured that I could probably just about manage that with time to spare in the month, so here we are.

A photo

This is me. Nothing artistic to offset the general disruptions of late middle age / early elderly senescence that is rapidly overtaking me. I was never particularly good looking, and now I’m old on top of all that.

Name or nickname

My name is Kelly Adams, or Kelly Greig Adams if you want the whole thing spelled out. Kelly is one of those unisex names that never worked out well for the boys who got stuck with them back in the 1960s. That along with my red hair led to a lot of challenges with teasing, some of it not very kindly meant.

I survived and grew to appreciate my first name for its Irish Gaelic roots and its various combative/warlike meanings. Of course I’m neither combative (although I will put up a good verbal fight) nor warlike, but at least those are things that make the name more suitable for a male.

As for nicknames, I’ve adopted a few online handles over the years. Around 1995 I was PapaDoom as the oldest player of Internet Doom on most of the servers I logged on to. Later I found that name in use in many places so I adopted AgingGamer, which is now part of the name of my gaming blog Words of the AgingGamer.

Where in the world I blog from

I blog from Castlegar, British Columbia, Canada. We are fortunate to have a fairly mild climate here: we get all four seasons including a fairly snowy (a metre or so) and cold (-10 degrees C or thereabouts) winter. But for the most part no insane -30 degree periods like in much of the rest of Canada.

A picture of the mountains and my trike not far from home on Highway 31A

Before living in Castlegar I was born and raised in Edmonton, Alberta: my best friend still lives there. I lived in Edmonton until I was 35 then moved west to Cloverdale (Surrey), British Columbia to avoid being forcibly relocated by my employer to Calgary Alberta or Toronto, Ontario. The computer industry in the late 1990s was still very much one where you had to live where the work was, and my choices in Alberta were becoming fewer and fewer.

My wife and I moved to Castlegar at the end of 2020 in the midst of COVID. Mostly it was a matter of wanting to get away from the crowding and rush of the lower mainland, leveraged by the fact that COVID brought with it support for remote working arrangements. We accomplished our goal: living in Castlegar with about 10,000 residents is a much more relaxed life versus living in the lower mainland with several million. And now we are both retired, so the relaxation factor is doubled.

What my blog is mostly about

My blog, Ubergeek Kelly’s World, is about whatever interests me. That generally includes things such as politics and world events, computer related topics, science and technology, and my own life ranging from events around the house to dealing with health, aging, and mental frailties of the human body.

I write here inconsistently: sometimes several times a week, and sometimes entire months go by without a word from me. A lot of what motivates me to write is time dependent. As in: do I have the time and/or am I making the time by choosing to drop other things like reading or learning Python (for a current example).

You can learn a lot more about me from the About Me page or, better yet, by reading my blog. Skim randomly, use some of the categories or the search interface, and take advantage of the “You might also like” page element at the bottom of most posts. After a while I suspect you’ll get a sense of who I am and what to expect on my blog.