about "Penguin Pete"...


Name: Pete Trbovich
Date-of-Birth: September 22, 1969
Resides in: Des Moines, Iowa, USA
Occupation: You're looking at it.
I live with my wife of 19 years and my two children.
Contact:
PPcontactI might even respond

How did I get here?

I had a strong interest in technology all the way through childhood, but when I hit my teen years I came to the stupid and naive conclusion that because computers were so easy for me to figure out, they would be that easy for everybody and hence there was no future in technology-based careers. No, really! I thought programming, web design, and computer graphics would be like flipping burgers - something anybody could do!

My other ambition was writing. But 19-year-olds seldom get published. Instead, I launched on a number of checkered careers dabbling in this and that. Amongst my many pursuits were:

And where am I now?

It is this last career that I semi-retired from. Thanks to some smart financing and some minor investments (not stocks! coin and currency collecting!) that paid off, I was able to coast for several years off of that nest egg while deciding what I *really* wanted to do. And then I realized that computers and writing would always call me back. No matter where I was or what I had been doing, even when I came home from a construction job I would sit down to a computer and practice C programming.

Starting a second life as an online freelancer, I today make most of my revenue from writing, graphics design, minor programming, minor web-design, the occasional consulting gig, and other Internet-related work. I have a website with ads, but that's not something I count on for much besides smoke money.

I am the happiest of all now, because I am doing exactly what I loved to do all along, and am my own boss.

Where might I be going?

Writing for the web is great, but I'd like to publish a book or two. I would also like to develop my graphics skills further into an artist's career of its own. Maybe start my own studio? Whatever else, I will always be following the development of technology and being close to the cutting edge of it, while taking any career that keeps me next to it. Being a geek is in my blood, anything that turns my geek interest into money is good for me!

What other interests do I have besides computers?

What is going on with this blog of mine?

It is a huge mistake to take anything here too seriously, and a lesser, but sizable, mistake to not take it seriously enough. When I am at my most impassioned, I will play a few humorous notes, and when I am in full humor mode, there's a dot of seriousness in each joke. Just like there is a dot of Yin in the Yang and a dot of jelly in the peanut butter.

My first mission is to inform, a close second is to entertain. But look out, because my third mission is to shake you up. I like to turn your perception upside down, pull conventional wisdom inside out, and hold a fun-house mirror up to everything you think you know. I am a polemic and gadfly, out to ask the most troublesome questions and speak the most unpopular observations in service of the pragmatic truth. It is my duty, as a person blessed to have been born with thick skin, to do the job no one else wants. But on my fun side, if I charge off into the woods and discover a new waterfall, I'll come back for you and drag you to come see it.

I just happen to do this in the field of technology, because it is what I was born to do.

Back you go to the front page.