I was born in Hayward, California on April 3, 1970. I moved to Salem, Oregon at age 4, and lived there until I graduated from McNary High School on June 3, 1988. I joined the Air Force on June 14, 1988, and got out with an honorable discharge on August 1, 1992. I moved back to Salem and lived there until around June of 1995, when I moved to Corvallis.
On October 5, 1996, I married my wife, Lisa. We lived in Corvallis until December of 1998, when we moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, where Lisa was from. We currently live in Raleigh.
Summer of 1982 we got our first home computer: a Sinclair ZX81 with a whopping 1 kilobyte of RAM and a 16 kilobyte expansion. That led to a TI 99/4A in 1985. Didn't really do much with either except playing, although I honed my BASIC skills on the ZX81. The TI was a mess to program graphics in.
After I joined the Air Force in 1988, I bought myself a Commodore 64. I bought my brothers a modem for their C-64 in December of 1988, and bought myself a modem in probably March of 1989 (when I finally had a dorm room with a phone line). That was probably my downfall.
In November of 1989 I got on Q-link, and was almost instantly addicted to the world of online chatting. Any other Q-link alumni out there know how easy it was to rack up hundreds of dollars a month in online charges.
I bought my Amiga in probably summer of 1990. Around that same time I migrated from Q-link to GEnie, as a lot of others seemed to end up doing. That Amiga served me well until the 1994-1995 time frame, when I started using IBM compatible PCs at work and at home (a girlfriend at the time had a PC). In 1998 I worked at Diamond Multimedia, where I learned a lot about computer hardware, and started building computers. I built a P233 for Lisa and me which I'm still using. That probably led to my current job at IBM. (How ironic. When I was really into my Amiga, I swore I'd never own an IBM computer -- now I work there.)
Nowadays I use Windows 98 (boo hiss!) at home and at work. At some point I'm going to do a video card transplant on the P233 and install Linux on it in a dual-boot partition. I never seem to get around to doing the transplant, though. I'm getting back into programming with C++, which I'm still in the process of learning.
To see an old, doctored picture of me, click here. The picture was taken at a party, and I was originally wearing a tank top and shorts. The "costume" and background were added later, with a paint program, by the guy who took the photo.
I'll put in a link to my resume here when I get around to updating it. No reason to update it right now because I'm happy with my job (unless someone wanted to up and offer me a programming job for scads more money than I'm making right now!).
