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No, this isn't going to be a tedious recitation of my entire life since the day I was born. Just assorted trivia in random order, to satisfy the folks who want to know more about me.

I'm Canadian, sort of. I was born in Toronto but I haven't lived there since I was six years old and I have only visited once or twice, when I was maybe ten or twelve. I can't tell you what it looked like, what the snow was like, or anything more than a handful of memories about my family life there. I never learned French, and I didn't learn the National Anthem until I was past thirty. Mostly I play up the Canadian identity thing when I want to stand out (or should I say "oot"?) in a crowd. Technically, I never went through the formal paperwork to pick up US citizenship - I still have the tattered old green card that was issued to me in Detroit in 1969. I am told it's just a formality since my mother and wife are both citizens, but at my age, why bother?

In addition to Toronto, I have lived in Houston, Galveston, Crockett, Nacogdoches, and Dallas, Texas before settling in the wide open countryside of Wyoming. I have relatives in Germany from my father's side, but I have not been there since I was a wee lad either.

I'm a Christian! If you have known me a long time and did not know that about me, shame on me. I don't believe we are called to beat folks over the head and coerce them into joining the club, but neither am I ashamed or unsure about what I believe. I'll be more than happy to debate the finer points with you, or you can read more about my worldview in the rants section.

I went to college at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, TX from 1981 to 1985. I started out going for a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (of course) but they required me to pass calculus. I proved conclusively - twice - that I would not be doing so, and instead changed my major from a science focus to a business focus, still in computers. To this day I have not once made use of the specific programming skills I learned in college, but the BBA was useful in getting me my first few jobs after I graduated so I guess it was worth my dad's money.

I'm an old-school computer geek. By that I mean I got into computers in 1977. The first one I owned was the Commodore PET in 1979, with all of eight THOUSAND bytes of memory, a screen that could only display 40 characters across by 20 down, and no storage except for a cassette tape that almost never worked right. I remember using paper tape spools in high school, and my freshman BASIC class was the last at our university to use punched cards before everyone moved to the newfangled video terminals like the ADM-3, connected to a massive Honeywell CP-6 mainframe. My database professor was all about COBOL; for four years we learned how to describe databases in COBOL and use archaic sorting methods to retrieve data from mainframes. After I graduated, I never saw one mainframe; my entire career has been built on using database programs on PCs: dBase II and III, R:Base, and Clipper, the last of which is still my primary focus at my job of nearly 16 years. So while I can tell you more than you ever wanted to know about how to optimize a dBase search query or add new DIMMs to your AMD 486 motherboard, I can't help you a bit with your Javascript or Flash animation or your php scripts, whatever they are.

I think that covers all the high points. You can read all about the things I do for fun on the Fun Stuff page, more about my job on the Work page, and... well, just read the section headings at the top and read it all. If you really feel an urge to pry into my private life more than I have written, email me and I'll make up something.