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Purpose

As I explained on the home page, Pandapolis is my personal website and blog, to share with friends and family, to let the world know this is here, to show off my talents to potential employers, and to ward off potential squatters to the Pandapolis name (particularly zoos with giant pandas, toy companies that make stuffed pandas and otherwise harmless fanatics of the Panda Express restaurant chain).

Beginnings

• 1999 - When dinosaurs ruled the earth, 56K dial-up was the zenith of technological evolution, and people still bought CD's at confiscatory prices from brick-and-mortar music stores, I started an online jukebox channel on the Imagine Radio website called Radio Free Rich, with a strange mix of smooth jazz and modern rock. (No wonder nobody listened to it.) It was later renamed The Kickback Cafe.
• 2000 - I created an companion website around the jukebox station in 2000, also named The Kickback Cafe. The host music site was renamed Radio SonicNet.
• 2002 - Radio SonicNet shut down, and The Kickback Cafe jukebox station with it. The website kept the name.
• 2006 - The Kickback Cafe is given a new look and a new name, Pandapolis, to avoid confusion with other personal sites of the same name with highly questionable content.
• 2008 - Pandapolis' website coding is converted from HTML to XHTML, which I learned in 2007 from a really cool book I checked out from the library on the subject. Unfortunately, for some reason GeoCities appears not to support Transitional XHTML (or I didn't enter the code properly), so I switched it back to HTML. Live and learn.

My Stats

When Was I Born?

March 5, 1970 in Los Angeles at USC Medical Center. Do the math.

Where Do I Live?

West Covina, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, which celebrates its 85th anniversary of cityhood this year. Nicknamed "Diamond of the San Gabriel Valley", West Covina is the home of a Big League Dreams baseball park, a Westfield Shoppingtown mall, and one of the largest Filipino communities outside of the Phillipines. It's also more than twice as big as just plain Covina, another nice L.A. suburb.

How Do I Email You About Pandapolis?

Here: info@pandapolis.com. So there.

Are You That PBS Guy That Does Those Commentaries and Video Essays on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer"?

No. I'm much better looking, in my blatantly biased opinion.

Are You the Head Coach of the University of Michigan Football Team?

No on that one, too. That's another Rich, and good at his craft, too. I've never even been to Michigan. The closest I've been to it was Chicago, while switching planes at O'Hare Airport.

Well Then, Did You Go to College?

Yes. I hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Communications with an empasis in Film and Television Production from Chapman University in California.

What's Your Favorite Music?

I've never been a fan of one particular style. I grew up watching "Soul Train", "American Bandstand" and "The Lawrence Welk Show" with my parents on Saturdays, listening to "The Dr. Demento Show" in my teens and college years, and appreciating big band music from KGRB-AM, a small radio station in West Covina whose transmitter was a few miles from where I grew up. Currently I like smooth jazz, classical, contemporary Christian, big bands and Broadway show tunes. I've also been a lifelong fan of "Weird Al" Yankovic.

Can You Lend Me 20 Bucks?

Sorry, I can't. Ever since the bad PR over Bambi's mother being shot the National Park Service is understandably very leery about visitors getting in close contact with the deer population, let alone renting out twenty of them.