[I'm rewriting this page. I hope to have a better version soon.]

My name is William Barnes but I prefer Billy. I am a 23 year old Canadian.

I am a student at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. I hope to find some way to combine my interests of law and computers, but the way has not yet presented itself to me. I try to blog about that on this website. I also write for Osgoode Hall Law School’s IPilogue.

I enjoy creating websites. I used to tear down and rebuild from scratch my personal website several times a year. That was my idea of fun. I work mainly in PHP and Javascript and I prefer JSON to XML. I used to also run a process serving company (technically, I still do, but my involvement is decreasing). If you don’t know what a process server is: on TV you might see some guy show up at a character’s house with pizza or flowers, thereby enticing the character to open his or her door, and then handing the character an envelope and saying menacingly “You’ve been served.” I was that guy with the flowers. Only I never did the flower trick and I don’t think I’m very menacing.

I have an Honours Bachelor of Arts from the University of Toronto. The ‘Honours’ part is misleading because it implies some difference between me and some hypothetical group of just ‘Bachelor of Arts’ students. Instead, the UofT has stopped offering the option of getting a BA and simply gives everybody an Honours BA. Which, by my reckoning, makes the H.BA simply a BA. I double-majored in Philosophy and Political Science and graduated with high distinction (theoretically summa cum laude) in Spring 2008. My diploma is on the wall in my office.

I have two cats named Daisy and Shadow, and an iPod named iBurt. On the iPod, I listen to about a dozen hours of podcasts/netcasts/mevios every week (which uses a lot of bandwidth and proves that Rogers is crazy when they say 60GB a month is enough).

Someday, I’ll re-write this in a manner that doesn’t seem like one big run-on sentence.