I'm AlderaanDuran, because I found the username funny. I'm 32, I live in a suburb of the Twin Cities in Minnesota, but grew up in Saint Paul. In real life, many people call me Egg, because it's the sound in the start of my lastname. I'm a recent homeowner, recent refugee from the big city to the quiet burbs, and recently married as of October. I'm non-religious, but my life is moderately focused around buddhism, mainly zen practice.

I work in IT, and my title is System Analyst III Team Lead, but in real speak I am an infrastructure/architecture guy for a medium sized company in the lending arm of the banking industry. I design, architect, build, and implement new applications, as well as support existing ones. Without getting too long winded, I work a lot with servers, networking, architecture activities, load balancing, XML configs, IIS, Biztalk, the servers themselves, and work hand in hand with devs to bring these applications and new releases through the code promotion process from dev, to qa and clienttest environments, and eventually to production. I am a manager of sorts, but I still like to get my hands dirty.

I also have a side photography business, both selling prints and doing wedding photography, though I've been pretty idle on this the last few years as my day job takes up a lot of evening time and weekends, and the rest I want to spend with my wife and cats at home. Lately photography has been more of a personal hobby and artistic outlet than a business. I play a little piano and guitar, I juggle, read a lot of books, and play outdoor hockey in the winter. I love all kinds of music, but my favorite genre is probably hip-hop. Atmosphere is probably my favorite band these days, but I like all kinds of artists in the scene.

I'm also super passionate about space, and humans place in the universe. I am the SpaceX unofficial mouthpiece around here. I'm also really into aviation, mainly WWII aircraft being something I can never read enough about. I also have my single-engine-land VFR private pilots license, and have logged about 80 hours, but am not current anymore. I originally wanted to join the Airforce and fly jets when I was younger, but turns out I'm too color blind to even hold a gun for the marines. That stupid test with the color dots and the numbers? Yeah, I get to the second page and I'm already guessing.

I love coffee, malbec, good craft imperial stouts, and love to eat anything that comes from the ocean. Mussels, oysters, clams, scallops, lobster, crab, urchin; yum.