You know: who am I, where I'm from, and all that stuff. I would say "as if you cared," but you are reading this page.

I think the jargon file said that one with a hacker's mentality could be infuriatingly literal-minded. I'm kinda guilty of having a "hacker's mentality" and am definitely guilty of being literal-minded. So, when someone asks "Where are you from?" I have to wonder "Whattaya mean? Where I was five minutes ago? Where I live? Where I was born? Where I was raised?"

So, I'll take the safe approach and cover all the bases. Or, at least all that I can.

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I was born in Glasgow, Scotland on September 29th, 1965. I didn't hang around long after that. Nine weeks later, my mom flew to the US to some dot of a town in upstate New York; my father caught up with us a few months later after he mustered out of the Navy.

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After spending a couple of years in various locations in and around Olean and Rochester, New York and Emporium, Pennsylvania, we ended up in Chicago, Illinois. My father had secured a job with Martin-Marietta as, I think, some form of technician. The only notable memory of that time is that of a bat that had somehow gotten into the apartment. I couldn't blame the thing; it was Chicago and so it was damn cold. Anyhoo, brooms were brought into play in an attempt to catch it. As a toddler, it was way funny to see adults running around swatting at this thing as furniture went flying, women screamed, and pandemonium ensued.

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After a year in Chicago, we were transferred to Orlando, Florida. I guess we tired of bats --- except we traded in bats for geese, which were more of a problem for me than for the adults for a change. There was a time that Dad had to chase away several ganders that were running me around and around and around the carport. This time he decided to escalate and gave up the broom for a shotgun.

And, no, despite our close proxmity, we never made it to DisneyWorld. One of these days, though, I plan on going.

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Then we moved on to Georgia at or around 1970. First we lived in Douglasville, then Marietta, and finally Acworth. This time there were no geese, but there were plenty of shotguns ... in pick-up truck gun-racks. Yee haw.

Acworth is where I spent most of my formative years. While I lived there, I finished elementary school and graduated from Etowah High School in 1983.

The Acworth/Woodstock area can be described as being in the hinterlands of Atlanta suburbia -- at least at the time that I was living there. Now it's been pretty much absorbed into the mega-services, residential complex that surrounds just about any given American metropolitan area. In any case, it was sort of a backwards area just a hair shy of qualifying as "being in the sticks."

I started college at Southern Tech in the Fall of '83. Six years later, I received my B.Sc. in Computer Science and was the first graduate in the new "Artificial Intelligence" option. While I was in school, I joined the Cooperative Education Program, which is why it took me two additional years to graduate; but, the experience I garnered at IBM and NYNEX as a co-op were well worth the wait.

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After graduating, I briefly worked for NYNEX as a full timer. But, Dr. Bob, who was the head of the Southern Tech computer science department, forwarded a job advertisement to me. It was about a programmer's position for a small firm based in Silver Spring, Maryland. This company specialized in AI work, which was something I was keen to jump into. I had spent most of my life in Georgia and most of my "career" was spent working for mega-corporations. This seemed like the perfect ticket to escape both and to do interesting work in a (as I perceived at the time) exotic location. So, in June of 1990, I rented a U-haul, hitched my Hyundeath to the back of it, and drove North ... and I've been here ever since.

And where was I five minutes ago? I don't move that fast, so I'm sure it wasn't far from where I'm at now.