This blog belongs to Jonathan Vanasco, just another guy in Brooklyn.

About Me

Quick Intro

My name is Jonthan Vanasco. I'm just another guy living in Brooklyn. I do things with computers, words, and raw materials when I'm lucky.

For a few years I played in the Brewskeeball Competitive Skeeball League ( East Village League as The Holy Skee, Goatskee and Brewniccula ), and last year I played on the 'Brass Knuckles' team in Brooklyn Kickball. I'm always up for frisbee , soccer or bike riding.

Education

I graduated from Pomona College (possibly the happiest and smartest place around) in 2000 with double majors in Political Science and Media Studies. I was fortunate enough to spend a semester on the East African Coast, where I studied Urban Art Forms & Methods, spent far too much time in Mombasa with the greatest artists you'll never hear of, and played nonstop cards and football on Lamu Island. I even worked as a tout on a matatu for a day. I thought about going to LawSchool for a while, now I'm leaning towards an MFA or an MBA.

Professional

My interest in the net started in undergad, when I interned at a string of Startups. At Pomona I produced my first personal project, "The Booty Party" (later named "Campus Cupid") - the first college-specific, closed crush matching & compatibility website. It was basically a closed network 'secret admirer', and we let everyone know who their matches were at a big party with a bunch of kegs.

I've since worked as an online media strategist, branding consultant, technologist and designer with everyone from major record labels, to media outlets and beauty brands. I've designed both hardware and software for kiosks, and worked on the first RFID enabled retail shelving units which were placed in WalMart stores. A few years ago, I co-wrote a screenplay about Breast Milk and Fads with this guy, and have written several equally irreverent shorts since.

In 2005 I left the 9-9 world to focus on my own projects, with a concentration on identity, syndication, and workflow efficiency. The umbrella for my online startups is called SyndiClick, and aims to help consumers and publishers deal with the proliferation of online networks. Every property we've developed has been about significantly ahead of the market.

I am currently CEO of FindMeOn.com, and consult technology architecture and business development to a handful of NYC startups.

Why 'Destructuring' ?

I thought Destructuring was another one of those words that some postmodern author imagined. On a whim, I opened some Derrida or Foucault book, flipped to a random page, and chose the least-likely-to-not-be-a-real-word word to where my finger landed. I was *pretty sure* Destructuring wasn't real: and I was half-right. There is no real word 'destructuring', however it does exist as Computer Science term which is popular in the Lisp community ( and growing in JS, from what I'm told ). However... the CompSci definition had little to do with the manner in which the PostModern author used it, so they're still wrong. I'm just less right. And I'm okay with that.

Why All the Crappy Movies & Books?

I studied film for several years in undergrad. One day I realized that film/media studies makes you hate movies, and ruins your creativity - people end up focusing on inane revisionist histories like "the usage of white & black in Citizen Kane". Orson Welles couldn't have cared less about white/black and what it could convey - his cinematographer was drunk or high and just shot what looked cool. When I realized what a bitter, cynical cliche those classes were making me, I dropped the studies. To detox I started watching awful movies for a few years - and it finally worked - I actually enjoy watching films now. Sometime around 2005 I played around with exporting Netflix and Amazon histories into blog entries, and trying to do 1 line summations. Some worked, some didn't.

My Projects

Current

Commercial Projects

Open Source Projects I Maintain

Open Source Communities I'm Invloved with

Too many!

Past

Commercial Projects