Half what?

One of the best things about having a company with an obscure name that kind of sounds like it could be a band, a comic shop or a skateboard company is the fun stuff that it means in other languages.
In Turkish, it’s slang for disabled. In Kinyarwandan, I’m convinced it means something pretty funny because in Rwanda I was introduced as “He is Jim. He is Halfman.” and then there would be funny looks. On second thought maybe it has more to do with my manhood. In Slovenian, it doesn’t really have any wacky connotations. Most of the time in English, I get the question “Halfman, half  what?”

Good question.

This is something I think quite a lot about actually. What do I do, why am I called this, and how does what I do and why I do it fit together. Well the answer is actually quite simple. So simple in fact that its taken me about two years to figure out. The answer is that Halfman is fundamentally about being human. Being human for the most part means feeling – caring, hating, reacting irrationally, having fun, joyous Sunday mornings or just plain wanting to have a decent cup of coffee and a chat to go with it. That’s it.

What I do is try to make things (software, systems, devices) human, or you could say human-compliant; have software tell a story, or have a system help you move on from difficult things in your life.