About Me and This Site

Hello all. If you’re looking at this page because you want to know a little more about who I am, well, here it is. I was born to coal miner parents in the hills of western Tennessee. I was a very fat child and my parents couldn’t afford to feed me so they dropped me off at a Piggly Wiggly one cold December night thinking someone on their night crew might show some mercy and take me home. That didn’t happen, but thankfully I was baby-snatched by a couple of illegal Russian immigrants who took me back to Moscow on the next train.

While in Russia, listened to Sesame Street’s Greatest Hits, learned seven languages and became a world class martial arts expert and eventually fought my way back to the states in the cargo hold of a potato ship. I landed in northwest Georgia where I reunited with my parents and continued my education at a local high school.

While there, I excelled in everything except academics, sports and the social scene. In 1988, I was voted “Most likely to start a website and post a picture of me wearing a red bow tie.” It was a unique award since no one but me and Al Gore knew what a website was.

After high school, the Navy told me they would pay for college if I would agree to start shaving my head sometime in the next 10-15 years. As you can see from the picture, I took them up on their offer. And so I went on to a small college in South Carolina where I picked up a four-year degree in an amazingly fast three years and ten months. I think that’s still a record.

Since the Navy was so good to me, after college I became an officer for them and got to live on a ship and travel all over the world. A couple of years later, they said they would pay for graduate school if I could solve a Rubik’s Cube in less than three minutes. I did, and went out to California to learn some physics. After a few more years of wearing a cool uniform, they let me out. I had always loved hammers so I went to work for Home Depot for a while. I sold a lot of hammers and 2x4s and stuck around in the retail world for a while longer.

During my time selling concrete and roofing tar, I met the girl of my dreams, settled down and convinced her to marry me. We picked up a couple of kids (I believe they came from Florida and Virginia), and agreed to support them until they become wealthy enough to support us both with the lavish lifestyle we deserve. In this effort, we’ve even given them their own bedrooms and (usually clean) clothes. We call the girl child Princess or pumpkin head and the boy child Little.

By now, I kind of missed the navy but I had been out too long to go back in, so they told me I could come work for them as a scientist. That’s what I do now. I work with other physicists and electrical engineers. We mostly sit around the office solving fourth order differential equations (and Rubik’s Cubes). And sometimes we eat ice cream.

PS: I’ve never been to Russia and my parents didn’t drop me off at a Piggly Wiggly. They are both great.

This site is about a lot of things. Lately I’ve been brushing up on my PHP and MySQL coding and I’m playing around with writing a Matlab and Octave Tutorial.