Personal Info

The first thing you'll notice on this page is that there is a photograph of me. This picture was taken on the 19th of December, 1996 by Kimberly Stevens at my bookstore, Basilisk Dreams Books. The only thing that may or may not be different about me today is whether or not I still have my beard, and how long and scraggly the beard is if I, indeed, still have it. Other than that, this photo reflects the current me pretty well. It doesn't reflect any of the emotional turmoil that was a part of my life when Kimberly left for the U.S. (not to mention the stress and workload of running the bookstore), but I likely have lost a bit more hair during this time.

Where to start? Well, let's see, I was born in Leeds, England on July 3rd, 1955 (so that makes me currently 42 years old I guess), at 4:45 am on a blisteringly hot morning...so hot, in fact, that it would set a record for daily temperatures that still hasn't been broken (to the best of my knowledge). As I understand it, we moved to London when I was all of 2 years old, took occasional trips down to the sea-side, and then moved to North America and a city called Montreal in the province of Quebec when I was all of 3-and-a-half years of age. Then...

This isn't really what you wanted to know, is it? I didn't think so... <g>

My childhood isn't really of interest, and I have to state that my adolescent years weren't all that stimulating or stirring either. Adolescence was a period of my life that, in many ways, I would like to forget. My love of reading books stems from this period of my life (actually around when I was seven or eight), and SF/Fantasy literature has been one of my fondest reading pastimes. I did my first couple of computer courses (one on the basics of computers, the other on Fortran of all things) during high school, but computers were still really in their infancy. I hated them! (Something that I would obviously change my mind about later on, but even so...) I had several odd jobs during my adolescence, since I wanted money to be able to go to movies, buy comics (I'm a big fan of the Legion of Super-Heroes, despite some of the changes in that comic book these days), buy books, have fun, and that sort of thing... but this time of life comes to an end. I found myself doing under- and post-graduate work in Psychology, but found myself without a job in that field.

From there, it was on to a course in banking at the Karen Hall Institute. A fine place to go for this sort of training, which paid off in that I was employed as a bank teller at the Bank of Montreal for several years. After that, the call of the computer wooed me gradually away from the banking industry. I had a morbid fear of computers at this time, but I found myself lured to the Honeywell Institute in Toronto (I had been living in Ottawa since my under-graduate days). The intensive courses at Honeywell were no piece of cake, the course lasting for eight months, and when I came out of this "practical and real-world programming" environment, I got a job immediately as a computer programmer with a small company.

Eventually, I became disillusioned with life in Toronto, even if I was happy there for the most part. Suffering from allergies and asthma to some extent, the pollution of Toronto led me to accept a job in computer programming at a small company in Ottawa. I returned to Ottawa, and worked for SPS Consulting before finding a permanent position working for Arcadia Computer Systems. The company, like some small firms do, went bankrupt for economic reasons, and at the end of October, 1995, I found myself out of a job.

While I had been active in the world of and used computers, it was roughly around the time that I moved back to Ottawa that I rediscovered the wonders of OS/2 Warp, and have had a wonderful, if sometimes hectic, time with the operating system and doing demos and working on promoting the IBM operating system.

And that's where the next chapter of my life, owning a retail bookstore selling science fiction and fantasy books, starts. The bookstore, Basilisk Dreams Books, has been around now for some two and a half years and is still surviving and attempting to thrive. In the meantime, I've also become an active roleplaying game playtester, and have recently worked with such system as DragonQuest , Universe , and am currently the Rules Editor and Playtest Coordinator for the Witchcraft RPG . In the meantime, I continue to play roleplaying games, but that's another matter entirely and is dealt with on my Roleplaying Games set of pages. I did have another minor setback, however, the week of December 5th, 1997... I had an accident with my Mazda 323 that totalled the car, and within a month or so, I had bought a 1996 metallic grey/purple Neon from Car Plus. (Trust me folks, these people are very considerate about the hassles one goes through to find a new car, and I'm rather pleased to have found the car so quickly.

In addition, Basilisk Dreams Books moved from the old location on Beechwood Avenue to the new store location at 857B Bank Street on the first of March, so things have been somewhat hectic at the store as well.

Well, here it is the 3rd of July, 1999... Another year in my life has gone by, since I turned 44 today. I suppose that when all is said and done, it's been a good year. I've had a bit of love in my life, I've made a few new friends through the sf and fantasy bookstore, and I've had to get myself a decent laptop computer (I got an IBM Thinkpad which now has OS/2 Warp on it, of course!) and revamp my entire computer system at home after a major CPU crash. My life has gone in a rather pedestrian fashion this past year, for the most part, although I guess the really interesting stuff that happened occurred in my roleplaying life. I became the Rules Editor and Playtest Co-Ordinator for the folks at Eden Studios, who market the WitchCraft roleplaying game of magic and dark secrets. And I have rediscovered my love of the fantasy roleplaying game DragonQuest , which I haven't run for almost two and a half years. Basilisk Dreams Books continues to survive in this marketplace of the chains, and the independent bookstores continue to decrease in livelihood. All in all, it's been an interesting year and a bit; although most of the events have been positive, there have been a few negatives as well. Life is like that, you know? This continuing chapter of my life is still unraveling its weave, so...

You can send me e-mail at jkahane@comnet.ca.