User Profile

Born in Missouri in 1967, I spent the early years near rolling forest hills and meandering rivers. This is, in my opinion, an important time for a boy to see nature and adventure and I think Mark Twain would have approved. Not to have my education stalled, however, our family moved to Albuquerque, N.M. in 1981. You may be thinking, Albq. is not the icon for education, but there were accelerated courses available during the day and advanced placement courses after school. After high school I went to the University of New Mexico, largely for financial reasons.

At UNM I intended a degree in Computer Science with a minor in Psych, a good start for work in AI. When the time came, however, I found that I could just take 4 more psych courses and get my degree while CS was still at least a year off. I wanted to be done, so I opted for the reversal, a Psych degree and CS minor. There was also a year off where I was in the Navy at the Russian Language School, but it turns out following orders is not my strong suit and I left the Navy with a convenient medical problem with my hand. Then I went back after all and finished off the CS courses to get into the CS masters degree program. Before I finished with my masters, really as I was just getting started, I found the lure of easy money had a very strong appeal (Don Henley: Smuggler's Blues) and so went to work doing system administration full time which was, yes, easy and lucrative.

During my stay at UNM I joined a few clubs, they were: fencing, cycling, aikido, brewing, society for creative anachronisms, and objectivist clubs. Fencing club suffered from fluctuating attendance. Our first instructor taught French style, then there was an absence of advanced instruction, and later an Italian style Provost (a position studying to complete a very difficult transition to fencing master via the Italian school) took over. I always liked French style the best, but the Italian style proved very effective and the instruction helped my game significantly. When I left the club I would have been a C rated epee fencer. I say would have been because, though I had scored into that category, I didn't have a USFA membership at the time.

Cycling club was convenient because I had only a bicycle for transportation. I rode about 15 miles a day just to and from school, more if I needed to go anywhere else. One day my massive old Schwinn, the lead sled, broke down too much for any kind of simple repair and I bought a Cannondale. Yee-ha! That bike practically pedaled itself. I started riding with the cycling club for 50 mile rides on the weekend and then, after building up a Fisher "Hoo Koo e Koo" mountain bike, doing a friday ride in the mountains nearby. All in all I was riding about 100 miles a week and loving it. I only did one century ride, the Tour of the Rio Grande Valley (TORGV).

I'm not going to run through all the clubs, but brewers club was a lot of fun too. The UNM Zymergy Club. We'd take turns brewing at (messing up) each others houses. Each member would bring all his equipment and together we'd have a pretty professional setup of pots, fermenters, tubes, giant spoons, etc. It was great fun and yielded a very desirable product.

During my stay at UNM I worked first at the computer lab as a student consultant and then as a system administrator at the campus computer center. It was called CIRT (Computer Information, Resources, and Technology) and was a very diverse place to work. There were old systems than almost no one remembered how to run and systems so new that no documentation existed on how to deal with them. The university had thousand of students and I don't know how many kinds of different systems.

After UNM I worked at the NM Lab of Anthropology in Santa Fe for a while as the all around tech guy. It was a very fun job with great people, but it put me in a vacuum, technologically speaking. There was no one there who cared when the new book on File System Design came out or what programming language was better for some new task. It was good experience. I learned new things because I had no one else to ask for help on the parts of the job I didn't understand, but it was not to be.

I moved to Seattle for a job at Amazon.com in 1999, the internet bubble. What the Lab of Anthropology had not been, Amazon was in spades. Everywhere there was new technology; bleeding edge technology. The people there were great too. Amazon could afford to be selective in its hiring process and the people I knew there were and are some of the best friends I've ever had. If you walked down the hall with a printout of some new and fascinating scientific advance there would be someone else there who had either read it or worked on something similar. The same was true for new games. Ultimately, however, Amazon required a lot of hours work, more than I could handle as now I had a family.

I'm not going to say who my current employer is, lest I express some frustration online that would reflect negatively and come to the attention of the HR Nazis.

Now I'm raising a family, which takes most of my time, but still reading (science fiction in particular) and writing a little. I tried my hand at a web comic for about a year and now I'm trying it with a real (ink and paper) comic of a different genre with an artist friend. I run an amateur weather station and website. I work on a 1980 RX-7 when I need to, which is often. The RX-7 was rigged up as a rally car but I'm using it as a daily driver. I do mostly perl programming now, both for home projects and work. I play guitar periodically, pausing in between streaks for long enough that my calluses go away.

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