Programming Apple ][e BASIC in 6th grade was love at first sight. A couple of years later my parents' "family" Christmas gift was C64 -- I bought the Memory Map later with my few dollars, ref-tab'd and dog-eared it over the next couple of years. Pascal in 11th grade for AP 5 and three wasted semesters at UVa repeating that course's content -- though not wasted for getting to take two classes under the amazing Randy Pausch (RIP), the greatest classroom teacher I ever had by a long mile. After finishing the core curriculum in 3yrs and little else, started working but kept mainframe help-desk job as the transition from the mainframe to the mini took place. X-Windows, RFCs, sockets and the power of the cmd prompt for 7-years, while full-time cranking Commodity Futures algorithms on historical and 9600 baud live data via DOS Extender with my own Window manager, custom Tetris included which via C's trusty rand still managed to not send a straight piece when I needed it.

Blur of years of dbs, front-ends, combos, and a host of companies simultaneously blessed and cursed with the prodigious output of an uncontrollable nerd with a passion for perfection and freedom.

Now, beautiful wife and two beautiful children and maybe my very own official company after somewhere around 28 years of knowing that's what I want. No, I don't want the hassle of all the paperwork, but software sucks too bad not to show people what's possible.

I mean, c'mon people, at least make ALL of your dialogs resizeable (yes, SSIS and Microsoft, I'm looking at you) and if I size it and move it, it had better be right there and that size the next time I open that dang thing, got it? I mean, dang, am I asking too much?

I wish for all human beings to have lasting peace and happiness, knowing that the machinations of this world could be directed to that purpose. Let's engineer happiness, fellow nerd warriors!