When we left off, former software impresario and all-around goofball John McAfee had fled Central America and landed in, of all places, Portland, Oregon. Now he's speaking publicly, offering up stories about his life like:

I had my right testicle shattered by a hammer in 1974 when I ran afoul of some local drug barons in Oaxaca. It's the size of a grape now and shaped like a small frisbee.

And:

I was also taking more drugs weekly than most of you will do in a lifetime, and I was a totally indiscriminate user. Whatever came across my desk went up my nose, down my throat, in my veins or up the nether region.

The stories get stranger from there.

Q&A

Last year, McAfee was wanted for questioning by authorities in Belize (where he had lived) in a murder case—and he promptly fled, eventually landing in Guatemala and later Miami. By January 2013, he claimed that he had spied on the Belizean government as the result of a massive spyware and keylogging setup on donated laptops. He then claimed to have bought a pickup truck and driven to Portland.

Since then, he’s been giving interviews semi-selectively—going to strip clubs with local Portland reporters even. McAfee is working on a graphic novel with a local artist, a biography of his life, and a “feature movie of the Belize incident.”

On Wednesday, though, the founder of McAfee Security took to his keyboard for a moderated interview with Slashdot. The result? McAfee revealed that the reporter from Vice magazine who embedded with him and his entourage that fled Belize for Guatemala actually did leave the EXIF data containing his location on the photo. And thus, this reporter accidentally revealed McAfee’s location. (Surprise!)

That’s just one of the myriad disclosures (or possible half-truths—it’s hard to tell) that McAfee offers up.

[Vice senior editor Rocco Castoro] then told me about the location data accidentally included in the photo and that there were already posts on the Net showing Google earth images of the hotel we were staying at. It didn't sound so bad to me really—not in comparison to an angry Samantha [a girlfriend]. It meant that Guatemalan soldiers had probably already been dispatched to arrest us and that we were on the run again—this time from a different authority, but we had at least a half an hour before the authorities arrived and taxis, which did in fact affect our escape, were plentiful. I didn't see a problem... To calm things down and to get everyone focused on our need to hastily scram, I told Rocco and Robert that I would take the fall and claim that I manipulated the exif data myself and they would be in the clear. Satisfied, they got packed, we left 10 minutes before the soldiers arrived, and I did what I said I would do. It was a stupid plan but it did clear the minds of the two journalists long enough to allow them to function properly in the shaky circumstances.

Other gems from the interview include his programming résumé:

I haven't written code in 20 years. In truth I was a terrible programmer. At all the companies I worked at I did everything within my power to avoid coding tasks. I was just good enough though to be able to spot the truly outstanding programmers. At McAfee I hired the best and then stayed out of their hair. If I had been responsible for even a tiny amount of code I fear we would never have gotten off the ground.

And on his continued association with the company that bears his name:

I haven't been involved with McAfee Anti-virus for 21 years. When I ran the company the software was the best and least intrusive on the market, and in 1991 we had 87 percent of the world market. What happened after I left was none of my doing. As to name association, I am a master at sullying my own name and, all things considered, being associated with the worst software on the planet ranks way down the pole. It's barely a blip in the ocean of associations—madman, paranoid, child molester, murderer, drug addict, unstable, liar, to name but a few. Thank god I'm 67 and will probably be too hard of hearing soon enough to have to listen to them rattling around wherever I go. Amy, thankfully, did half the job already by bursting my left eardrum when she tried to shoot me in the head while I slept back in 2011.

Say what you will about McAfee, but he never ceases to entertain.