About Me

I am a guy who was born several decades ago and grew up (mostly) in Southern California. This has coincided with a life-long interest in computers, among many other things. I spent much my youth involved in my hobbies of programming and music, learning to play the electric guitar as a teen. I also liked computer games and video games a lot.

Later, my attention turned more towards the humanities and systems administration, and in college I began running my first web server from home in the early 2000's, which happened to be Apache on Linux. I also experimented in journalism and studied foreign languageas as well as a mix of literature, anthropology, history, and politics.

After college I found work in IT, but being generally unsatisfied with my jobs, I began to develop an interest in linguistics and Persian language. A few years later I was granted a scholarship to study Persian at California State University, and this eventually led to me mastering the language as it is spoken in multiple countries, including the dialect spoken in Tajikistan (Central Asia), known by the misnomer "Tajik".

While studying Persian, I transitioned to a career in teaching, and once finishing my studies in California, I moved to Tajikistan and got married there. Among the many languages I studied and dabbled in at that time, I successfully mastered Esperanto and began teaching it as well as participating in various Esperanto-related events. (Conferences, meetups, etc.) I also received a certificate for (basic) proficiency in Turkish language after completing some courses provided by the Turkish embassy in Dushanbe.

In order to pursue a bachelor's degree in Persian language and literature, I moved to Iran with my wife and studied at Ferdowsi University, Mashhad, one of the most prestigious universities in the world in that field. Having survived the twin terrors of the Donald Trump presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic, I finally graduated in 2022, and we quickly returned to Tajikistan while my wife was carrying twins.

Now we live with our two daughters (perhaps the first Gemini twins) in Dushanbe, where I teach English at a private international school.

I discovered Gemini and Gopher for the first time in 2020 and launched my capsule almost immediately thereafter. To my knowledge, it is among the first forty known Gemini capsules to have come into existence. kwiecien.us was registered the previous year partly in order to provide XMPP service for my family.

Among my notable accomplishments as a member of the Gemini community are the creation of Gemini Radio, the first "gemcast" (i.e. Gemini podcast), and hosting geminauts@chat.kwiecien.us, an XMPP chat dedicated to the Gemini community.