Personal

My name is Jay Torres and this is my website.

I’m 31 years old and I currently live in Santa Ana, CA. I was born and raised in San Diego and moved out when I was 18 to go to college where I attended UC Irvine. I majored in Mechanical Engineering and am currently a Sales Engineer for an HVAC company based in Corona, CA. As of June 2011, I’m a contributing technology writer at TechZulu. I also help out on a gourmet food truck.

Set Up

I’m a self proclaimed Apple whore. I currently use a late 2007 MacBook Pro attached to a 24″ Dell monitor. I have owned a total of 4 iPods, 2 iPhones, a 12″ PowerBook, a MacBook Pro, a 1st generation 160GB Apple TV, a 2nd generation Apple TV, a 32 GB iPad WiFi and a 500GB Time Capsule. You can read more about my set up, along with the software I use and how I get things done on Shawn Blanc’s series of Sweet Mac Setups.

Publishing

Currently, my site is running on WordPress and is hosted on Dreamhost. After using Taco HTML Edit and CSSEdit for years to code and design my site and using Transmit to upload, I’m giving Espresso a shot (no pun intended). For writing individual posts, I write using a fork of Notational Velocity called nvALT. Once I finish a post, I upload using MarsEdit.

The Site

The original idea of this site started back in the summer of 2001 as a Homestead site (!) but is now somewhere lost in the Internet. The current incarnation of this website started back in November 2001. I started this site because I had heard about this thing called blogging and it seemed like a cool thing to do at the time. Little did I know that it would evolve into an almost complete documentary/commentary of my life. What started out as a literal play by play of my college life has turned into an outlet for my thoughts on any subject. As it did back in 2001, I have no real plans for this site other than to keep doing what I’m doing until it evolves into something else.

The origin of the name “ABSOLUT JAY” came about around 2003. Back then, I used to collect ABSOLUT Vodka ads. I thought they were really clever and something I could use to decorate the walls of my room. A couple years earlier, blink-182 came out with Take Off Your Pants and Jacket. I decided to come up with my own ABSOLUT ad by combining the album art of TOYPAJ and my AIM screenname.

Contact

Feel free to contact me to share your thoughts or just to say hi. It’s super flattering to know that people read this site and I would love to hear from my readers from time to time. I am most accessible through Twitter or email me at jaytorres@gmail.com