Interviewing Kato

Yes, dear readers, I've scored another interview. Today, I'm posting an interview with the renowned Kato... blogger, gamer and computer programmer. My words are in bold print.


Thanks for doing the interview, Kato!

Where did you come up with the name for your blog (WITFITS)?
Ahh, 2005. I remember it like it was 4 years ago. Perhaps the most difficult thing about starting a blog for the first time was coming up with a name. I wanted it to be generally representative of the type of content one might find on my blog, but be succinct enough to serve as a good Blogspot address. Memorable, witty, etc. I mulled a few computer and programmer-related terms ("core dump", "deadbeef", "null exception"), but finally settled upon the lesser known internet acronym: WITFITS. I have often wondered how many of my readers were even aware that it was an acronym for "What In The Fuck Is This Shit?" I felt it accurately described my purpose for blogging early on: ranting about odd stuff I'd come across (my first real post was about a guy dying from alcohol enemas) or just weird observations in general. It holds a double meaning, though, describing my own feelings about how my creative energies seem to come in bursts, as if I'm having "fits of wit" or "wit fits" which I would then document.

I remember that enema story. My best friend and I laughed about it for hours… until he asked me to give him one. I told him to ask his wife.
You know what they say, "What's an enema between you and a friend?" Wait, no one says that.

Where did you come up with your online name?
"Kato" is actually my real-life nickname, one used so commonly by a certain group of my friends that to them it IS my real name. The origin isn't terribly interesting and somewhat muddled now in my memory, but essentially it was bestowed upon me in college. A comment was made that a friend of mine and I were like a superhero and his sidekick (particularly since he stands about a half foot taller than me). He suggested that I was the Kato to his Green Hornet, and it just sorta stuck.
I started using the "Katonian" surname that sometimes follows my nickname online as a result of often needing a more unique name than "Kato" to identify myself with various services. It is an obviously ridiculous play on my nickname that ostensibly means "of or pertaining to Kato".

I wondered if it was a reference to Kato Kaelin… however O.J.’s buddy spelled his name.
People tend to assume that, but we both in fact get our name from the Green Hornet's sidekick, played famously by Bruce Lee.

Since you mentioned the Green Hornet, who’s your favorite comic book hero?
I think Batman has always been my favorite. I like that he is just a "regular" guy (albeit one who works out all the time and has a seemingly endless budget for high-tech gadgetry). The darker aspects of the character appeal to me as well. Superman is too "goody two-shoes" and how interesting is a guy who has so many super powers?

Oh, and if it counts, my favorite super villain (besides Dr. Katonian) is The Monarch from The Venture Bros.

My guess is that you're single, but you've cut way back on the blogging because you found a girl. Am I right? If so, tell me about her.
I'm unmarried, but I met a wonderful woman a little over two years ago who has blissfully ended my bachelorhood. She is, in many ways, perfect for me, a fellow geek who, much to my surprise loves me for my geekiness, not in spite of it. She also laughs at my jokes, which is really the true litmus test. Although focusing on my relationship with her has certainly contributed to my almost abandonment of regular blogging, it is not the only factor. I bought a house about a year ago and have discovered how much of a time-sink it is, albeit a mostly enjoyable one. I also have any number of unfinished personal side projects going on that take my time and attention, such as iHaloStats.com, my Halo 3 stats webapp for the iPhone. And then there's videogaming.

I can relate to “loves me for my geekiness, not in spite of it.” How did you meet? Did you buy the house together, or were you already planning to buy when you and the …. Ummm…. Little miss?? … met? What are you doing to the house? Is it a fixer-upper? Simple stuff like paint? Remodeling just to make the place your own? I’m asking cuz I kind of enjoy working on my house too.
The house is actually in really good shape--the people who have lived there over the years have taken pretty good care of it. It's my first house, and the majority of my projects tend to be aesthetic or practical, like painting and cleaning, or wiring network cable to every room, or grounding as many of the electrical outlets as possible (a task I honestly put little personal work into--my dad and a good friend of mine who are both way more versed kindly helped me out). I've got a wonderful large yard that requires its fair share of upkeep, too, and dabbled in some flower garden planting this summer. As for your other questions... for now I'm going to decline to answer in the interest of privacy :)

Is your iHaloStats.com something you’re doing for its own sake, or do you see yourself making money from the app someday? If you get famous, can I say “I knew him when…?”
It is totally something that I've done for its own sake, and for my own education. I did it to both fulfill a community need (a way to view Bungie.net's Halo stats on the iPhone in a sleeker, easier way) and as a way to learn more about a variety of programming topics, including web app development for the iPhone. iHaloStats is not something that would ever likely be for profit, both for legal reasons (my application relies solely on Intellectual Property that belongs to someone else) and for the simple fact that I wrote the site for people to use as a tool, not as a way to get rich. As for saying "I knew him when...", the whole process of developing iHaloStats has set me down the road of iPhone native app development, so maybe someday you'll be able to claim that you "know that guy who made that app that does that thing!"


I also understand that you like spending time on XBox LIVE. What's your favorite game, and why?
I could talk for hours about gaming, and there's probably no way I could single out a specific game that's my favorite (of all time). As a kid I was a big fan of the myriad Sierra games (such as Space Quest) and Baseball sims. In MicroLeague Baseball I would sit down and play "seasons" of games that I would schedule and actually keep a scorecard of the whole game, recording every out. Somewhere in there was a golden age of "flight sim" type games, and I gleefully blasted Imperial Tie Fighters and Rebel X-Wings with my trusty joystick in the games bearing their names. These were preceded by my tour of duty as a WWI flying ace in Red Baron. I was enamored with the flying machines and the "romance" of dogfighting, and I even kept a written flight log of my missions and promotions.
I used to be a PC gaming snob, and for a good span there I was really heavily into EA and DICE's Battlefield series, which has spawned probably a dozen titles/expansions by now. Consoles finally proved that they were capable of producing games on par visually with PCs, and I have been almost exclusively an Xbox 360 gamer for the past year and a half or so. The convenience of sitting on my couch, playing on a big screen, on a console that doesn't have driver issues or the other idiosyncrasies of PC-gaming, finally converted me.
I'm a fan of the Halo series of games and hop into Halo 3 now and again when I feel like getting my ass beat by pre-teens hopped up on Mountain Dew. I'm still playing Fallout 3 (and its many expansions) into which I've sunk an ungodly amount of time exploring the ruins of post-apocalypse D.C.
Currently, I'm playing the hell out of Red Faction: Guerilla, which leverages a mostly-destructible world for some really fun gameplay, both in single and multi player. The fact that you can deal with an adversary by opting to take out the building from under him is awesome (if not revolutionary). Also, it has jetpacks. JETPACKS.

I love Halo3 too, but kind of got tired of the sh!+ talking kids. And then there are the kids who just have an obscene amount of talent. My 16-year-old daughter has a friend who’s so good that he can no-scope snipe someone, while running, from half a screen away, virtually flawlessly. The guy is insanely skilled… I’ve never seen the likes of it! My brother-in-law turned me on to Fallout 3. He lent me the game and I finished it. I’m tempted to buy it and play it again as an ‘evil’ character. Are you interested in the new Halo 3: ODST?
In some ways I've always had a love/hate relationship with Halo multiplayer. It is a very refined, very well-developed experience. It is fun as hell, and it can call me back into its clutches quite easily. It has a huge community, and that's where the love/hate sort of expresses itself. I love that I can always find a game--that there are countless people playing at any given time. I hate that there are people that just do nothing but play ALL THE TIME and, of course, I seem to always get stuck in a game against them. I eventually stopped playing Halo 2 online because I thought the matchmaking was so bad--I would hop on with friends and it would be mismatch after mismatch. It just wasn't fun. I think Halo 3 has improved on that a great deal, but every multiplayer title suffers from the problem of how to accurately match up players so that it's fun and fair. Fortunately, early on I introduced the girlfriend to the Halo series, and she's always willing to team up with me and take on the shit-talking "kids" and no-scope fiends.
As for Fallout 3, at this point with the time I've invested in the game, I probably could have a Ph.D. by now, or have written 10 killer apps for the iPhone. But, what can I say, I love me some Nuka Cola.
I'm looking forward to Halo 3: ODST. The Halo Universe is an interesting one, and I welcome new stories that take place within. Plus, it has the voice talents of Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin (Mal and Jayne, from Firefly) as well as Tricia Helfer (Six, Battlestar Galactica).

What are some of your hobbies in the real world?
I'm the kind of person who always has a dozen just started or half-finish personal projects that will probably never see the light of day, so if you can call "multitasking" a hobby, then that would be one. I obviously enjoy videogames a great deal, but I'm a gamer in general, too. Put down just about any board, card, or strategy game in front of me, and I'll play it. I keep saying I'm going to start a 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons campaign for some friends but I never get around to it. I've had an on-and-off-again hobby of painting miniatures for several years now. I think it's really interesting and enjoyable, even relaxing at times, but I tend to do it in spurts (like most of my other hobbies), geeking out over it for awhile and then burning out and turning to other things. Blogging is still a hobby, and I've been leveraging my frequent game-playing by writing a weekly faux news column called "Katonian Press" at HawtyMcBloggy.com, a well-known gaming blog. Programming is perhaps my oldest hobby, and in spite of it being the crux of my career, I still enjoy doing it in my free time. Currently I'm supporting my webapp and learning to write applications for the iPhone. I've also become somewhat of an amateur birder along with my girlfriend. We live in a nice area that gets a lot of backyard birds and have spent the summer putting up feeders and houses, watching them come and go, learning to identify a bunch of different birds, and generally being entertained by them.

Dude! I could have written that paragraph! I originally thought that you might be hooked up with Hawty McBloggy. I suspect I’m wrong, but feel free to confirm or deny my suspicion.
Ha, no, she and I only know each other through the Internets and the Halo community. I've been a regular commenter on her blog for some time and after reading some of my stuff she thought my sense of humor and writing style might be a good fit for a weekly piece on HawtyMcbloggy. Also, she is happily married with kids in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm happily in a relationship (with pets) in Ohio.

Dungeons and Dragons… Tell me about your favorite role playing character. This must be a character that YOU played. Tell me about your favorite character that someone from your group played.
For all my interest in the game, my actual playing experience has been somewhat limited, games wedged in here and there, half-finished campaigns and one-off adventures. Years back I played an Elven Ranger in 3rd Edition who I sort of loosely modeled after Aragorn and Legolas from Lord of the Rings. He was calm and concise in action and speech, cool without being cocky, mysterious without being dark and broody. He saw himself as the protector of the party, particularly the "weaker" (i.e. magic-using) members. His devotion to the others and the party as a whole put him somewhat at odds with the rogue in the group who was brash and a risk-taker. I've always enjoy the concept of the ranger class, being particularly fond of the rangers found in Tolkien's writings (Aragorn, the rangers of the north, Faramir and the rangers of Ithilien, etc.) Also, he duel wielded (longsword/shortsword) which is just cool.
As for favorite characters from a group, I don't have any so much as I have memories for some specific roleplaying moments or exploits. There was the oft-picked on mage who had taken his name from the official random name generator and wound up with "Ashram" which our DM continually referred to as "Ass-Ram". There was a monk who took off in a full sprint and leapt up to grab a second-story balcony ledge to pull himself up and get the upper hand on an unsuspecting archer. Then there was the half-elven fighter who, in an attempt to ingratiate himself with some suspicious strangers in a tavern, sat himself on a barstool and opened with: "So, an Elf, a Dwarf, and a Halfling walk into a bar..."

Favorite board game? I love Axis and Allies.
Of all time I couldn't say (though I like anything sufficiently complex and intricate, like Axis and Allies and the like). I am currently really enjoying the excellent Battlestar Galactica game by Fantasy Flight Games.

We haven't heard from Dr. Katonian lately... is he hatching another master evil plan?
I always planned for Dr. Katonian to make more appearances, but it never quite worked out. He, like many good ideas, was conceived in the midst of a terrible fever I was running. He is still around, though. In fact, like everyone else, he's on Twitter! I would love to do more with him, and there is a plot hatching in the back of my mind, but whether or not it would ever reach fruition is tough to say.

Holy Balls! I never saw the original emergence of your evil counterpart. That’s hysterical. Homey don’t twitter though. But then again, I just got a Facebook account a couple of days ago. Kind of lame for a fellow computer geek, eh?
I'm a big fan of Twitter. It allows me to exercise my wit in a concise, constrained way. I can comment on all the little things that I never had time to blog about before. It also lets me track the exploits and thoughts of a lot of interesting people at one time. As for Facebook... I only recently myself joined and use it mostly to let people from high school know I haven't died yet.

Your blog says that you're a computer programmer. How do you like being a computer geek? Is it what you wanted to do growing up? If not, what did you want to do as a kid?
I've been a computer geek almost my whole life. My dad brought home our first computer when I was just a kid--an IBM PC clone made by the now defunct Leading Edge. I started learning to program almost right away, dabbling in BASIC on both the PC and pre-Mac era Apples. My dad was the one who got me interested in computers, sharing his own interest in them with me, and we spent time programming and building machines together. But I never really considered a career in computers. Honestly, I didn't really know what I wanted to go into until I was looking at colleges my senior year of High School. I discovered that the university I was most likely going to attend had a degree in "Computer Science", a term I didn't really understand at the time, but it was what was suggested to me based on my interest in programming. Once the courses really hit their stride midway through my college career, I knew that it was a good fit for me.
I have always enjoyed being a computer geek, although sometimes it wasn't easy. I learned to use a word processor (WordStar, in my case) early on, and my peers and teachers were very pro-computer/computer friendly. When I changed schools for middle school, I got hazed a bit for doing my homework on the computer. The other kids couldn't understand why I would "put all the work" into typing it up and making it look neat when I could do it "much faster" by hand on looseleaf. I never saw it that way--to me, using the computer was faster and easier. Oh how times have changed.
Being a programmer can be frustrating at times, but it's rewarding in its own right. A painter expresses himself through canvas, a writer through words, a programmer through his code. You have an incredible power to create and control when you're a programmer. I joke with coder buddies that all programmers have some degree of a God Complex: it is our utmost desire to make this machine bend to our will.

Wow! You’re O.G. (Original Geek or Original God-Complex… take your pick.)
As the talented and nerdy singer/songwriter Marian Call says, "I'll still be a geek after nobody thinks it's chic" Or to quote Weird Al: "Look at me I'm white and nerdy."

What kind of kid were you? Nerd? Jock? Student? Musician?
Not surprisingly, I was a nerd and a student. I started off as a pretty athletic kid (what kid doesn't run around a lot?) and really loved baseball. I probably even dreamed of being a Pro Baseball Player some day. But I was a small, scrawny lad, and so I never got too heavily into playing sports, becoming pretty bookish by middle-school. But I was, at least, a social nerd, and somewhat outgoing, going so far as to appear in a supporting role in our high school's senior musical. I dabbled a bit in music, learning some basic piano. In college I wanted to form my own hip hop group. I was nerdcore before it had a name.

Have you made peace with all of the swirlies you received as a child?
For the most part. Geeks rule the world. It is now we who administer the swirlies. Digitally. With our brains.

Has anyone ever seen you without your mask?
Yes, but there's just another mask behind the mask. (They were buy one get one free).

What question did you think I’d ask that I never got around asking you? What question do you want to ask me?
In terms of questions that you never got around to asking: "You used to blog regularly but you now seem to rarely update. Do you miss it? Is this the end of WITFITS?" I definitely miss writing regularly, it was a wonderful creative outlet. I had a great deal of fun relating amusing stories or odd things I had come across, and reveled in the occasional short story or fiction post. I miss the community of readers, however small, I managed to build around the site. There were a few of you out there who were dedicated commenters and I thank you for that--the comments were what made it all worthwhile. As for the end of WITFITS? I don't know. It feels like I once had mountains of free time during which I could while away hours crafting the perfect post, but now my attention is drawn in a dozen different directions. I will probably always have a tiny voice on the Internet, it may simply manifest itself in different ways at different times (blog, Twitter, direct brain interface, ...)
It’s interesting that you’re referring to blogging in the past tense.

A question for you: "Why did blogging appeal to you and what role has it served in your life?" And a selfish one, "Do you remember how in the hell you ever stumbled across my humble ramblings?"
I started blogging because I like writing. It’s given me a method of improving my technique and refining my style. Blogging has given me a way to tell myself that, to some extent, I AM a creative writer, without having to deal with all of the rejection that comes with being published in print. It’s also expanded my circle of friends somewhat. I’m a computer geek, but I’m also very firmly grounded in the physical world. While it’s difficult for me to say that someone I’ve never met is a friend, there are a few cases where this has happened. As for how I came across WITFITS, I discovered Paulius, Sunny and you within a few days of one another. I think that I ran into Sunny with the “Next Blog” button, she recommended Paulius, and he recommended you, but my exact sequence may be off.

If there was one blog you could recommend to my readers, what would it be?
Geeze, put me on the spot. Failblog.org is my current guilty pleasure, in spite of the Internet's overuse of the term "fail" and the fact that I think many of them are in fact "wins". I've also just recently discovered finslippy.com, which makes me question why I even bother to put words on paper when clearly there are others out there way more talented than me.

Chocolate or Vanilla?
Pistachio.