Hello and welcome to WalrusWay.com! Thanks for stopping by and enjoy your visit!
So to begin, I’m really named Chris Pratt (I’ve had to add that adverb for a while now since the upstart actor got famous and people began asking me “Really?” when I gave my name) and I also once was known as Wally many years ago in my undergraduate days. I smooshed ChrisP and Wally together into an online moniker CrispyWalrus somewhere around 2008 when I was active with Neverwinter Nights 2 persistent worlds. Before that I went by a few different screen names though unless you frequented the same MUDs in the mid 90s or were active with online MechWarrior games in the latter 90s to early 2000s you likely wouldn’t recognize any of them. CrispyWalrus has outlasted them all in length of use now and held up well– going by Crispy while voice chatting with friends on Discord was a no-brainer.
I have always been into tech from my neighbors Apple IIc in the late 70s, to my own TI-99 or playing around with friend’s Commodore-64 in the early 80s, learning BASIC on TRS-80s in high school, until my dad getting the family our first “IBM PC Clone” in 1986. I’ve been a PC guy since though I supported other hardware like Sun and Cisco. Still when I went to college CS was for nerds and geeks and those appellations were not nearly so popular in the late 80s as they have become so I majored in English for my B.A. thinking I might teach. Once out of college I started as a Borders bookseller and quickly became the store’s titled MIS Liaison and transitioned my career fully into tech when I moved to the home office in Ann Arbor, MI to provide remote tech support to all their stores. I then evolved into a systems and network engineering for a VAR and ultimately my last fulltime tech position was as a Senior Engineer, Infrastructure Services Support for EMC Corporation…
These days I’m a Dog Walker/Sitter Extraordinaire and Delivery Dude, a Gamer, and still a Technophile. I first created the walrusway.com domain around 2012 as a hobby site mainly playing with what used to be known as xhtml– basically JavaScript. I ran out of money and the site went down around early 2015. Luckily it was scraped by the Wayback Machine while it existed and you can still see how walrusway.com appeared then. In March 2022 I decided to reacquire the domain as I still find WebDev a fun hobby despite my mind’s coding cobwebs. I have been brainstorming what else I might do now that I’ve a website again and I think I have some idea.
Walrus Way is (will be) a social/hobby/lifestyle/affiliate marketing/blog/funnel site inspired by my online username of the last fifteen years. Basically I am looking to congregate hobbies, activities, and gigs I am involved these days in from dog walking/sitting to product reviews and purchase links of those items I actually use and would buy again. It will also include my hobbies like gaming and technology to serving as a demonstration of any webdev aptitude I possess in the event I begin such support as a side hustle. It’s basically my “Me” site since I lost ownership of chrispratt.com some twenty years ago– check out chrispratt.com circa 2001 in the Wayback Machine too! I was blogging before it was even widely called blogging. 😛