Why "GreyWyvern"?

I started using the internet handle "GreyWyvern" around 1997 when I began posting in newsgroups and sharing some of the QBasic programs I'd been writing. Plenty of people back then were using fancy handles so I chose one that married my favourite colour with a cool fantasy creature: GreyWyvern.

Since then I've used several other names such as RingoRaccoon, Orcinus and Cools-His-Hands in various other online communities, but since I came up with GreyWyvern first, and registered the domain name no less, I'm pretty much stuck with it. Eh, it's okay.

About the Site

GreyWyvern.com itself was born in the summer of 2000, when I registered the domain. I'd just gotten booted off GeoCities for violating their ToS, or some such nonsense. That event was the impetus for my decision to buy my own little corner of the internet rather than shack up with another "free" service provider. It gave me the freedom to post whatever I wanted, including MP3s of my own music compositions for which GeoCities had given me the heave-ho in the first place.

In the beginning, I pretty much slapped my whole life online. Music, drawings, stories, programs, even a primitive weblog – updated manually in plain HTML of course! Eventually I came to realise that the site was becoming little more than off-site, publically-viewable storage for my local hard drive. Beyond that it didn't have a purpose, or mission. The website (and I) needed a change.

Unrelated, but contemporary, events in a couple online communities drove me to sever a a great deal of networking I'd built up since I'd first set up shop on the Internet. It was a difficult, but refreshing time in my life which allowed me to focus on bringing GreyWyvern.com about onto its new heading: All about online stuff and junk.

About the Author

GreyWyvern is Brian Huisman, a professional web developer living in Ontario, Canada.

Oddly enough I have a degree in biological sciences from the University of Guelph, Ontario. Since I never went into the field though, it's not something I mention much. Still, I do find the subject – among other sciences – particularily fascinating.

I designed and manage the website of Road Apples Almanac, a hilarious webcomic by my good pal Don van der Ahé. I've been a fan of webcomics for years, but it's only since diving into the genre by assisting in publishing RAA that I've truly opened up to the amazing community surrounding this artistic medium.

I own a fourth generation 1992 Honda Prelude, and was team member and junior moderator of the Toronto Prelude Club.

Professionally, I specialize in standards-compatible web and web-application design, and would like to think that I'm quite highly skilled in PHP, HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. You can draw your own conclusions on that matter, of course. I've been an in-house web developer for Evertz since November 2002.