"Gort! Klaatu barada nikto!"

The sci-fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still was released in 1951, the year of my birth, making me (as of today) 57 years old. I am married, and currently living in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I was born and raised in New York (in Queens and on Long Island), and since leaving home I've lived in Illinois, Florida, California, Missouri, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Alabama, New Jersey, Louisiana, Virginia, and North Carolina.

I've been a sailor in the US Navy (Tonkin Gulf Yatch Club), a psychologist, and a Federal law enforcement Special Agent. Currently I occupy my time doing database applications with browser UIs, utilizing the superior technology of the LAMP stack.

I've worked or taught in Japan, The Philippines, Hong Kong, Canada, Italy, Germany, Malaysia and Croatia.

For fun I've raced sailboats, piloted single-engine aircraft, ridden (and crashed) motorcycles, and enjoyed my time on the firearms range. That might be why I don't hear worth a damn any more.

For fitness I run, lift weights, and ride my Giant OCR3 bicycle. And that might be why my back is shot.

But my main hobby is messing about with computers, and has been ever since I got my first one in 1981. I taught myself to program a simple form of Basic on that computer:

This blog, and several other websites, are hosted on a server that was once a Dell laptop before it got knocked off a table by some cats and had its screen hinge broken. It serves content out of my home office, and you're accessing it via the Internet connectivity provided by my local cable TV monopoly.

As an advocate of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) I run Fedora Core 8 on my personal laptop (a Dell Inspiron 600m), though it can also boot to Windows XP. My workstation (a home-built 2 GHz Intel P4 with 2 GB of RAM) runs Ubuntu Hardy Heron, and it too can boot to XP if required. The laptop/server is powered by CentOS 4 Linux, the RHEL clone. The blog software is some DIY PHP code I've cobbled together using the vi editor, and the content is stored in a MySQL database of my design. The combination provides an endless source of diddlin' entertainment. And sometimes a buck or two.

There's contact information below. I like to answer questions. Feel free to ask.