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I was born in Minnesota, so technically speaking I'm a Yankee, but that wasn't true for long. We moved to California when I was 1, but after the San Fernando Valley earthquake of 1971 we decided to move to Texas. I was only 5.

I guess I'm pretty lucky, we didn't leave Houston until I was 20. Unlike a lot of kids I got to go to high school with a lot of the same people I had met in grade school. In fact, I even got to go to college with some of them.

I've always been me, in fact I can't remember a time when I wasn't me. Even in grade school you could find me looking up books on UFO's. I've always been interested in the future.

I didn't care about fairy tales, I wanted to read about real life robots and how we were all going to be living on the moon by 2015. I was always into the abstract and the bizarre: Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis...etc. Just give me a library and I could always entertain myself; maybe it's because I'm an only child, but I never had a problem with being bored.

The Internet is a real boon to someone like me, an infinite resource; a place where I can come into contact with like-minded people to exchange ideas, thoughts, and concepts. As much information as I can absorb, right at my fingertips, 24 hours a day. It really gives a new meaning to the words, "You receive not, because you ask not."

I loved computers right from the start, I've been through it all, I've watched them start from their humble beginnings (when they were something that only a hobbyist would use) into what they are today (absolute necessities!).

I love math and I love solving problems and I'm not happy unless I'm thinking about something. The more I think, the more elegant of a solution presents itself. A lot of people don't understand that and they just wait until the last minute and settle for something that is far less than optimal and end up pulling their hair out. I like to plan, I'm methodical; I like to sneak up on things, slow and steady, like the tortoise.

I'm a perfectionist too, although you wouldn't know it from my desk, but that's because I'm an all or nothing guy. Computers play into all of that with their exacting tediousness and the concentration it takes in trying to get them to do the slightest things: getting them to do what you want them to do instead of what you just told them to do.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I have hobbies. I enjoy playing the piano, I once played the trumpet in high school marching band (1st chair). And I wasn't too bad a crew on my father's sailboat.
I grew up listening to old records so my music tastes are varied. 80's music is what I like best although I have lived through the disco era. I like 50's, 60's, 70's, you name it!

As for my spiritual life, I think science fiction brought me to it, with it's fantastic visions of the future. The utopia of tomorrow, where no one toils, and "Thine alabaster cities gleam, Undimmed by human tears!" But I realize that mankind will never achieve it. There are too many people in the way. We've got the technology, but we're too concerned about vain personal glory rather then trying to help out mankind in general. There will never be a world like that unless some narrow-minded cretin can find a way to profit from it, and that motivation alone would defeat the whole purpose. There are no adults in this world. Only God has the key.

I've been saved since 1986, although I've been searching far longer then that. I always felt like I was on the outside of something. Like there was something going on that everyone was in on, and nobody was telling me. I had trouble wanting to get out of bed in the morning. I felt like there was a party going on somewhere, I just didn't know where it was. I wanted in. And on August 17, 1986 I got serious, I read the NT cover to cover and was hungry for more. I watched Christian TV full time. Finally, I knew what I had been missing. I wasn't looking for the "party" anymore: I was in it. A party of the soul, where there's as much depth of feeling as you can desire. God touches you and you get to share with others; that love really does matter and all those people who talk about the "real" world are sick, dying, and diseased. God is trying to save them.

Mankind can get as rotten as it wants to, but it's not going drive away the future, not the real future. A future brighter then anything we can imagine and it's promised to us if we just believe. It's just a matter of waiting, it IS going to happen.