About Me
I was born on April Fool's Day, 1967, in Carbondale, Illinois, at 4:26 in the afternoon. I don't remember Carbondale because my parents moved to Chicago before my long-term memory formed. My earliest memory is of me riding my spring-loaded rocking horse alone, watching a Marlboro Man commercial on TV. I seem to vaguely remember the Gumby Show too, so it may have been during that show. Richard Nixon signed The Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act into law on April Fool's Day, 1970, which is why it went into effect on January 2, 1971. This means I was somewhere between 2 and 3 years old when my long-term memory kicked in to gear. I've been trying my damnedest to forget things ever since.
Whilst we were living in the "City of the Big Shoulders", my parents decided I was alone, and saw fit to give me a brother, Eric, so I would have someone to torture, er...I mean play with as a child. I'm not sure where they got him, but they assured me, they lost the receipt and couldn't return him, and I wasn't allowed to feed him to my dog, Baber (IPA: beɪbɜr) - actually Baby so named by my parents, but I had trouble with my 'i' sounds back then.
Luckily, my parents had the good sense natural selection gave them, so they high-tailed it out of the tiny po-dunk town of Chicago to the thriving metropolis of Port Arthur, Texas, birthplace of Janis Joplin. She wasn't home when we arrived. My fondest memory of Port Arthur was my first few weeks in school, where the teachers, not having heard a Chicago-born accent before, assumed I had a speech impediment and tried to place me with the special education class so my speech would get all correctified like.
After a short stint in the social melange that was, and probably still is the Golden Triangle, my folks up'd and moved us to Houston, where I spent my formative years, forming things what needed forming, like brain cells, bones, muscles, knowledge, friendships, political and philosophical leanings, humor, my love for art, and movies, and music, and various other things that got me into all sorts of mischief.
I spent several of my formative years working as a clerk for lawyers and then finally congregated my fecal matter and returned to school, where I earned my degree as an electronics technician in 1997. Shortly thereafter, I took an opportunity from National Instruments in Austin. After 20 years working for them, with my last 10 of those on the business side of their Web Commerce Team, I decided to further explore my love of web development and go back to school to learn coding.
That's why I'm currently attending the The Coding Boot Camp at UT Austin and will complete the course in early April 2018.