My name is Barrett Chase and I live in a place called Duluth, Minnesota, on the shore of Lake Superior.

I try to always have a camera with me: either my Nikon DSLR or my Panasonic Lumix. When I take a photo that I like, I post it on Flickr. This is kinda my thing these days.

Back in 2002, I started this website as a place to post my weekly comic, Occam's Razor. I didn't know what a blog was then, but I had a section on the front page called "News" that I updated whenever I had anything newsworthy to say. One day in early 2003, while working at a part-time job where I did basically nothing except kill time surfing the internet, I discovered weblogs. Two days later, I started my own.

At first, I used Blogger to publish my very important words. Since my blog really didn't have a name, people started calling it "Barrett Chase Dot Com." Then, they started calling me "Barrett Chase Dot Com." People still call me that sometimes. That's weird, but I'm down with it.

In February of 2005, on the two-year anniversary of the blog, I wrote The Product Manifesto and officially changed the name of the blog to "The Product." In the manifesto, I gave a lot of complex (and hopefully funny) reasons for changing the name of the blog, but the real reason was that I was bored and probably drunk as well, and I hated the fact that my blog had no name or official purpose. I got the new name from this cigar tin that I was forced to buy when I bought a bookshelf off the street, and the person selling it reduced the price providing that I would take everything that was on the shelf, too.

As you can see, I still have the tin.

When I changed the name, I also changed the blogging software to Movable Type, which has worked out well for me. For awhile, I got into making videos, but that kind of sucked.

I like words.

I like photographs.

I like living Duluth, Minnesota, getting all hopped up on the hooch, eating Thai food, watching TiVo, and attempting to believe that life is far simpler than it really is.

I design everything on this site using a Mac Powerbook, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, and good old-fashioned Text Edit. The pretty pattern background is from Squidfingers. Some of the little icons are from Famfamfam.

That's all I got right now.