I was born on March 6, 1963, so that makes me 40 (as of this writing). In any case, I grew up in Tennessee -- in Oak Ridge, one of the two cities maintained by the Manhattan Project for atomic research during WWII, and Kingston, a picturesque little town in rural Roane County, about halfway between Knoxville and Chattanooga.
At some point during the business of surviving childhood and
adolescence into young-adulthood, I realized that I didn't particularly
like Tennessee's climate -- meteorological, social, economic,
political, or otherwise. So, when the time seemed ripe, I ran away
from home... to Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Okay, I was 21 at the time... but if moving from balmy Tennessee to
the remote reaches of da U. P., isn't running away, what is, eh?
Arriving in the U. P. -- Houghton, to be specific -- was a bit of a revelation; I realized that, for the first time in my life, I had somehow managed to come home. The topology of the area is very similar to that of Roane County -- but the most significant difference is that Houghton and the rest of the Keewenaw peninsula (that little finger of land sticking out into Lake Superior) has a real winter, with an average snowfall of ~250 inches of snow a year.
The other thing that Houghton has going for it is Michigan Technological University, home of the Huskies (the Chicago Cubs of the Western Collegiate Hockey Association -- just kidding, they're not THAT bad...), and more importantly, the Huskies Pep Band, of which I was pleased to be a loud and rowdy member. In between the football, hockey and basketball games, I whiled away the time by getting a B.S. in Computer Science.
Once the degree was done with, I was unfortunately obligated to return to the real world in search of gainful employment. Two months later I found myself living in the Chicago area.
My first job in the area was as a consultant to AT&T Bell Laboratories in Naperville. I worked as a compiler/tools jockey in the International Program Administration Group; I was subsequently hired by Motorola, Inc. in 1988 to revamp the memory management of the EMX500 cellular switching platform.
After 12 years at Motorola, culminating in a really cool position as a Senior Staff Engineer Technical Lead for Quality Systems Implementation, I got caught in Motorola's rush to downsize the company in response to the tech crash of 2001. Since then, I've been a stay-at-home dad, doing part time work as Webmaster / Postmaster / Chief Software Engineer & Bottle Washer with the Zarquon Internet Consortium and also freelance consulting as a general web guru and software engineering process consultant.
In 1995, I married a long-time friend, Mary Cruickshank, and in so doing, inherited a bright, charming, wonderful daughter: Kate. Michael followed along almost exactly 9 months later (he was concieved on our wedding night, how bourgeois!), and another youngster, Patrick, came into the world in mid-November 2000. So now I have three children, one developing into a stunning young woman, one evolving from kid to pre-teen, and one rapidly accelerating into kid-dom who spends a lot of time testing his physical and mischief-making limitations, as most youngsters do.
In 2004, we finally found an opportunity to move back to Da Great White Nort' and bought a huge boarding house in Laurium, MI which was built by the Laurium Mining Co. in 1892.
When I'm not working hard, I play hard. Besides chasing the kids around, I ride my bicycle, work out on the Soloflex, garden, and putz around on the many and myriad projects associated with a 114-year-old house. Although I'm no longer in the area, I'm still active in Chicago-area Science Fiction fandom, and generally find myself speaking on one panel or another at one of the three Chicagoland fan-run SF cons each year. Between 1997 and 2000, I was a member of the Capricon concom (convention committee), as department head for the Dealer's Room; I subsequently sat on the Board of Directors of its parent organization, Phandemonium for two years. I'm now working with DucKon in as many capacities as I'm needed, which runs quite the gamut. Recently, I've discovered the wonderful world of YoHoHo! Puzzle Pirates and lead a swashbuckling online life as RaggedAndy on the Viridian Ocean.
I read a lot. No, I mean, A LOT. At any one point in time, I will typically have two or three books that I'm actively reading, stashed in different rooms around the house. (Actually, all of us read A LOT. We outgrew our bookcases almost before we bought them.) My personal favorite types of literature are Science Fiction and Fantasy, although I'm a pretty devout Mystery junkie as well. And no, I don't have a single favorite author... I also find myself with more and more comic strip collections; I have most of the Pogo, For Better, For Worse, Baby Blues, Fox Trot, Dilbert, Bloom County, and Calvin & Hobbes books.
I like to cook. You name it, I'll probably be willing to try to make it. I confess to being something of a food snob, although that tends to be more from a perspective of cooking meals from scratch as opposed to reheating the contents of cans or TV dinners; I'm definitely not in the Gourmet Magazine class of Food Snob (although I do like to read it).
Although I'm not really a Food Snob, I admit to being a Beer Snob. I will only drink American mass-produced swill when it's free, and then only if it's MGD which, while certainly not particularly good, is at least not very offensive. Give me a microbrew any day -- my favorites being Baderbrau and Rogue brewery, although I have a weakness for some of the Berghoff specialty brews and a sentimental fondness for Leinenkugels.