Hi, I'm Tom. I was born and raised in New Jersey, but I now live in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. I work for a company called SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, a large, 100% employee owned, technology consulting firm. I used to work for a division of the company that provided support to a Department of Defense office that managed a U.S. government program to assist the governments of the former Soviet Union to eliminate their stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and their associated infrastructure and delivery systems. Several months ago I transferred to another other division of the company. My new division does studies and analysis related to the future of warfare. In my current project I help provide support to an office in the Pentagon that handles planning for something called information operations (a military buzzword for managing information and information systems).

 

I went to college at Drew University, a very small liberal arts school in New Jersey. I was a history major and a Russian Area Studies minor, including three years of Russian language. Russian is a cool language, but unfortunately I've forgotten most of what I learned in school. But I still have my books and I keep telling myself that I'll get them out again one day and brush up on it again.

Other things that I did when I was at Drew included being a member of the school cross-country team. It may not sound like it, but being on a team that would run 40 miles or so during the week and then run in 5 mile races on Saturdays was fun. Cross-country is a very low pressure sport, and while we trained hard, we didn't take ourselves too seriously. I still run to keep in shape, but I don't train quite as hard as when I was on the team.

During my sophomore year I went on a ten day tour of Russia (it was still the Soviet Union at the time) organized by one of my Russian professors. We spent three days in Moscow, three days in St. Petersburg, and a few days in a couple of smaller Russian cities, Vladimir and Suzdal. It was an incredible experience. The history, the culture, the people - I loved it. It was bitterly cold (our trip was in January), but the weather helped make the trip memorable. How could I ever forget eating ice cream on the streets of St. Petersburg while the temperature was -10 degrees Celcius? I really want to go back again someday. That seems less and less likely to happen as time goes on, but I'm still hoping.

The building in the picture is St. Basil's Cathedral, an old church in the middle of Red Square in Moscow. It is one of the most beautiful man-made things I have ever seen. This picture that I took of it turned out pretty well, but you have to see the real thing to really appreciate it. Strangely enough, I've talked to people who've gone inside St. Basil's and they've said it's rather disappointing because it just isn't very interesting.

I was a told a strange story about St. Basil's while I was in Russia. According to this story, Ivan the Terrible wanted a great cathedral built to commemorate Russia's victory over the Golden Horde, the successors to the Mongol invaders who conquored Russia during the 13^th century. After it was built, Ivan the Terrible had the man who designed St. Basil's blinded because he did not want him to ever be able to build something so beautiful ever again.

After graduating from Drew, I joined a program called Volunteers In Service To America (VISTA). VISTA is like a domestic version of the Peace Corps. Basically VISTA helps match you up with a non-profit organization dedicated in some way to fighting poverty in need of help and arranges for you to work for them full-time. Types of organizations that use VISTA volunteers include literacy programs, Habitat for Humanity chapters, school districts, community garden centers, and hospital outreach programs. I worked for a community college in Kansas City, Kansas, where I assisted with a program to prepare unemployed people for community college job training programs. I learned a lot in my time in VISTA. It's not for everybody, but it was good for me.

I went to graduate school at the University of Michigan. I graduated from the Master of Public Policy program at the School of Public Policy, a two year program in economics, statistics, and political science. It's designed to help train people who have an interest in government policies in areas such as health care, welfare and poverty programs, urban planning, international trade, fiscal and budgetary planning, environmental planning and natural resource management, and defense and national security. Michigan is a great place to go to school. As a consequence of having gone there, I am now a big University of Michigan football fan.

I'm also a big fan of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. I amazed by how incredibly literate the man seems to be. The Sandman series references a great deal of history, mythology, classical literature, modern literature...Other Sandman fans may be interested in this link to annotations of the Sandman series. They provide a great deal of insight into the series that a lot of readers might miss.

Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol is one of my favorite books. The plot is intriguing. In 19th century Russia, before serfdom was abolished, landowners were required to pay annual taxes on the number of serfs that they owned. The number of serfs each landowner possessed was recorded by censuses that were conducted only once every ten years. So if some of a landowner's serfs died in between censuses, they were still required to pay taxes on the dead serfs. Dead Souls is about a man who travels around Russia offering to relieve landowners of these tax burdens by buying their dead serfs.

Last but not least, I am a huge Tori Amos fan. I have Tori in concert five times: twice in 1994 (once in Kansas City and once in Ann Arbor, Michigan), twice in 1996 (once at Wolftrap Farm Park in Virginia and once at the Lyric Opera in Baltimore), and once this year at the Baltimore Area. I actually got to meet Tori and after the Baltimore show, which made for an amazing night.

That's all for now. If you want to find out more about me, send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you.