Mr. Doug Pederson AKA SpectateSwamp was born on the 26th July 1948 somewhere in
the nether regions of Canada; sadly, little is known about his early life.
For approximately 20 years he worked as a computer programmer utilizing Fortran
H, Fortran F, Cobol, and RPG. He picked up BASIC a little later in his life, writing
systems for telephone companies, Cable Companies, and Rural Gas companies among
others.
While working at a rock quarry in 1972, he happened upon a mid-sized rock with a
hole naturally cut through it, but eleven years of obscurity passed before dreams
told him it was a very special rock. Later determining that it was an ancient Indian
Medicine Stone, he initially attempted to commercialize the rock and profit from
it, until the local Indian culture vehemently objected. Ultimately he determined
that the rock found him because he was, in actuality, an Indian Shamen [sic].
He found additional medicine stones in his frequent wandering throughout the Canadian
wilderness and RV parks, and began to use them to curse those companies that disagreed
with him; however, despite extreme provocation, he refused to curse individuals.
Somewhere around this time Doug picked up a hobby of video taping everything
he came across. He soon came to the realization that just about everything he taped
contained evidence of alien life. 'Enlightened' about video further, he soon became
convinced that the editing of video serves only to degrade the video as a whole,
and vowed to teach the world not only of the aliens and suspicious crow watching
him, but also the evils of video editing - except in order that incriminating evidence
be removed. Extroverted in his beliefs, Doug has propgated those thoughts on not
only videographers' forums, but also on IT forums.
Whilst working at Weyerhauser in 2000, he made the questionable decision of leaving
for New York to curse the UN - reasoning that this should be enough to end the worldwide
prohibition of marijuana - of which he has made refernce to being a user, going
so far as to call his company 'Tokin', which, according to Doug's local paper's
'expert' may have some connection to cannabis.
History was made when Spectate Swamp Desktop Search was released as open source;
and, though a SourceForge project was initially opened, Doug could not bring himself
to upload the source code, nor would he delegate, even to keen helpers, administrative
rights to help him in his life-long quest to make SSDS all that it can possibly
be. Currently, that would be many thousands of lines of spaghetti code, to which
he advocates users 'add a noodle and JAM IT'. Clearly unknowledgable on the subject
of propaganda and persuading people, Doug uses 'screen reshoots', calls people he
is pitching to 'lazy, and repeats his few ideas continually, without deigning to
even consider that there are better methods than his own. Refusing to listen to
those who seek to help him, Mr Swamp is often seen taking quotes out of context,
and posting nonsense which is both grammatically incorrect and irrelevant to the
topic at hand.
Today Doug can be found traveling from internet blog to chat room to any forum that
has not yet banned him for life, talking up the greatness that is SSDS, and posting
vidoes of videos playing on his computer screen.
Swampie's future plans are detailed and well established in his mind. Basing his
belief on an ancient and little-used calender system, it is Mr Pederson's
conviction that the world is due to end in 2012. Whilst a belief in the world ending
imminently would have crushed lesser men, Spectate thinks that due to his self-proclaimed
'Shaman' status and 'magic' stones, he can and will literally 'dance the problem
away'. Whether he will be able to do so is yet to be seen.