About.

I’m Pat Castaldo and this is where I’ve been collecting my latest thoughts.

The little blue paper-cut image of my head was made by Nikki McClure.

I co-founded and run buyolympia.com and Land Gallery, but also have designed Apple Design Award-winning Mac software, mostly relating to scales, mailing and shipping. When people ask me what I do, I usally just reply “stuff.”

I'm a really lucky guy, but I do try and work hard.

I live in Portland, Oregon with my amazingly talented wife and young daughter. I’ve got a son in college in Chicago, he’s rad.

Back in the 90s, I lived in the wet, very punk rock town of Olympia, Washington.

I went to college with the hippies at Evergreen where I was the managing editor of the school newspaper, wrote some COBOL for the state, and worked on the design for quite a few album covers, all while helping run a small record label, doing a ton of work for others, and puting on some music festivals.

I took a lot of photos back then.

I was a long-time president (and projectionist) of the Olympia Film Society, chair of the Olympia Planning Commission and sat on the Heritage Commission.

I believed then, and still do, that the best things in life are participatory.

In my free time, I like to play pinball. I mean, like a lot of pinball. In fact, in the late 2000s, I had played in more tournaments in a three year time-span than anyone else in the world (a record I no longer own). I play so much pinball I'm in a pinball gang. My basement once had twenty-five machines (but now I’m down to just three).

I’m also a weirdo when it comes to cars and motorcycles, having a kind of weird collection.