Welcome to my little plot of cyberspace. I grew up with a Pong, Atari and Commodore console systems. My interest in personal computers began when my father brough home an IBM PS/2. It was primarily used for designing and plotting CAD information, but I noticed that it came with a programming language called BASICA. So, instead of wasting countless hours playing Jumpman or Dungeon Lair, I could write my own! I went to my local library and dug through the computer magazines until I found some examples of game code. I photocopied them and rushed home. After typing in thousands of lines of code, I had written my first program! Yes, I skipped "Hello World" entirely. From there I followed the development of the PC, getting into the BBS scene, hacking, phreaking and cracking. I have been 'online' since 1989, and can remember the days of Archie, Veronica and Gopher. I have watched the Internet grow from a small network of Univerity, Millitary, and Corporate systems, to every Dick and Jane's iPhone. I support EFF.org and their battle for your rights.

I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, USA and grew up there until the age of 16. I played the clarinet in band, and was very active in academic sports. I played hockey, soccer, softball, and ran JV Cross Country. I also took gymnastics and wrestled for many years under AAU-USA and went to the Junior Olympics. As far as hobbies go, I was into stamp, rock, and Olympic pin collecting, model rocketry and HAM radio. I was also active in the Boy Scouts of America. I am an Eagle Scout and member of the Order of the Arrow.

When I was 16 I moved to Houston, Texas, USA, and finished up highschool at Cypress Creek HS. I took a Turbo Pascal programming class my senior year, and that hooked me on programming. I went out and bought a Borland book on TP, and began to expand my knowledge of the language. At the time I was also very active in the computer text art scene. This was the main way of advertising on and for a BBS, and in pirate software releases. The problem was, each picture was displayed to the monitor in a scrolling fashion, with no way to go back or control the display. So I sat down, and wrote the fist ever ANSI file viewer program. It was called ACiDView, after the art group ACiD that I was a member of. It was written in Turbo Pascal, and had the ability to play MOD music files in the background, full mouse support, a screen saver, multiple text resolution video display modes, and text display speed control. It has undergone many changes in codebase and authors, and is now open source and available on SourceForge.

I spent a few years in college, studying Computer Information Systems, including two C programming language classes and a programming logic class. I quickly got a job programming a front end software system for an airplane parts procurement database backend. The program allowed a client to submit queries over a telephone line to our BBS with a DBase of supplier's parts. If a match was found, the results were returned to the client, which allowed them to select the desired part/supplier and resend a notice to our BBS to fax a RFQ to the supplier. After a year, the parent company branched into the Internet Service industry. The startup ISP was called US Internet Services. I helped install, configure and administer BSDi servers and Internet services. Next I went to work for Telesystems, a telemarketing company that wanted to be an ISP also. I built them a system from the ground up. Then I went to work for a rapidly growing startup company called Paranet. They provided software, hardware, networking and people solutions in the corporate environment. Besides the odd support calls around town, I was a solution to Amoco's need for a systems administrator, web site developer, and programmer for 4 years.

In 2000 I moved to Austin and started working for a HR software company called Hire.com. We sold, administered, and supported a web-based HR hiring software solution. I was part of a team that was responsible for website modeling. This consisted of replicating the full functionlaity of our customer's website around our software, on our servers. The goal was to ensure that the person browsing was unaware that they had left the client's web server and were now reveiving information from ours. Often this was extremely difficult to do, and required a lot of custom programming and configuration of our software. I also developed a web based button (graphic) generation program that allowed our support department to work with the client in developing a button schema, to be delivered directly to the modeling department. After a few years of putting in some odd 50-60 hour workweeks they decided to let me go in one of their brilliant layoffs.

This was actually an excellent opportunity for me to step away from the corporate world, and take some time to focus on personal development. Since then I have done various contract web development work, but primarily I have been developing my programing skills in perl, PHP, C++, and designing and implementing MySQL. For the past 6 years I have been Head Implementor of an open source project (Circle), a multi-user internet based game often referred to as a MUD. This includes programming, testing, debugging, version control, creative oversight, management of progammers and other administrators, and server administration.

In this time I returned to college, and achieved a degree in Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin. I also began to explore the arts. I am interested in photography, stained glass and ceramics. I primarily shoot with a Fuji S2 and enjoy going outdoors and photographing still life and photo journalism. I enjoy creating custom images in stained glass, from small pendants and mirrors to full window scenes. Although I do not have a wheel or kiln to produce ceramics, I have taken 4 semesters of ceramic studies at Austin Community College, and hope to have more time in the future to take more classes.