So I'm finally writing up some personal stuff. If you're super interested in my biography, here it is. If not, you know where your back button is. ;-)
I am the oldest child in a family of five, not counting pets. My father is a traffic engineer, my mother is a science teacher.
I was born Nov. 27 1969, and was raised in Peoria, Illinois, on the banks of the Illinois river in Central Illinois. For years, Peoria was famed as being the most demographically average population center in the United States. I like to think it shows. While living in Peoria, I attended Washington Elementary, Peoria's public school for the gifted.
When I was twelve, we drove from Peoria to Seattle, then flew from there to Anchorage, Alaska, where we lived for three years, my father having gotten a traffic engineering job there. While there, I went to a couple of Junior high schools, and then to East Anchorage High School, where I had a lot of really close friends and hung out in the drama clique, doing various bits of mediocre stage acting and generally having a great time.
In 1985, we moved to San Antonio, Texas, where I spent a semester at Clark and the last year and a half before graduating at Holmes.
Then, it was off to The University of Texas at Austin, where I spent six years studying Computer Science, Mathematics, Psychology and French, living in the dorms for two years, an apartment with a friend for a year, then, best of all, at Seneca Falls Co-op for three and a half years.
The last couple of years of school I focused on cognitive science, with a focus on neural networks and artifical intelligence. I developed a novel model for Episodic Memory formation and retrieval which was eventually written up and published at the 1994 Annual Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
In May of 1993 I got my BSCS, and then took to working full time at The Laboratory, where I had been working as a student since September, 1989. For the last five years or so, I've been working on my masterwork, Ganymede, a ridiculously over-ambitious and over-engineered piece of free software designed to allow groups of systems administrators to concurrently manage network directory services. It can run on just about any Unix system, including Linux, muahahahaha. The revolution is coming real soon now.
These days, I work on polishing up Ganymede, I practice Tukong regularly and Yoga semi-regularly, I hang out with friends from silverChat, where I am known by the handle 'h.p.', which is short for 'H.P. Lovecraft', the pulp horror author who I was reading when I first signed onto a BBS system in San Antonio way back in 1986.
I am also involved with an effort to create a Cohousing community here in Austin, and I hang out with friends from this group a lot these days as well.
Music? Make mine Ska!
Now you know what's up with me. ;-)
