About

Hi, I’m John Riney.

Okay, so this is me. Taken at LiveX 2006

I write code. I make stuff. I take pictures. I write. I absolutely love music, and I occasionally try to make some, with varying degrees of success. I try to learn a little bit of everything. Owing to Irish heritage, I take great joy in drinking beer and telling stories. I’m sort of weird. How are you?

I work for a startup company called MileMeter. We’re pretty much the first new idea in auto insurance in a decade or more; instead of buying a policy for six months at a time, we let you buy a policy by the mile – one thousand to six thousand miles at the time. Your policy becomes just like a prepaid phone card; when it gets low, you just top it off. What’s the point of all this? Well, if you’re a low-mileage driver, like a student, or somebody who uses public transportation a lot, or even if you have a second car you drive on the weekends for fun, you can save a dramatic amount of money compared to traditional term-based coverage. If you drive less than 12,000 miles per year, which is the national average, you could save 40% or more. We also think there are environmental and societal benefits to having your insurance expenses described in an easy to understand, cents-per-mile figure. At the moment, we’re only available in the State of Texas, but we’re working hard to expand to the rest of the country soon.

CELEBRITY ENDORSEMENTS
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“You can’t be stopped. You can only be contained.”

–Ned

“MOD PARENT UP – Hes teh funnay”

–Anonymous Coward

“You are the finest piece of ass to ever walk into this bar”

–Mumbles, a woman with an above average blood alcohol level and a below average number of teeth at the Ladson Tackle Shop (now sadly closed)

“You know, it’s possible that you might be the coolest motherfucker here.”

– Newki (at Con)

“John was born on a hot, rainy day under a tin shed in a Peruvian white slavery camp. Put to work in the coca fields by the age of 4, he worked for the next decade, developing a vague distaste for forced labor and a dream of escaping the fields to become an optometrist. Seizing an opportunity, he savagely clubbed the foreman over the head with a spade handle and snuck aboard a panel truck carrying a load of pig entrails bound for the docks. There, he negotiated passage aboard a Japanese freighter in exchange for working as a cook and folk-singer. Free of bondage, he spent the next five years making tamales, performing the traditional songs of the Peruvian coca farmer, and seeing the parts of the world that have water on them. On his 20th birthday, John left the the Echimara Maru and took up work as a handyman in Bangalore. On his way to unclog a particularly pestilent outhouse, a crane delivering a load of computers to a third-floor office snapped a cable, crushing John under 25 computers and their assorted peripherals. Awakening two weeks later with a concussion and a 256 megabyte DIMM permanently embedded in his skull, he dedicated his life to all things technological.”

–I’m pretty sure I made this up