For those of you insanely curious (and you'd have to be insane to really be curious) about who I am, the guy behind Blue Knot Software...  this is the page for you! Aren't you lucky...

Vital (?) Statistics:

What can I say? I've been tinkering w/ computers since the 7th grade, when my math teacher introduced me to his TRS-80 Color Computer and started to teach me BASIC (it looked like a silver typewriter attached to a TV... 8 brilliant colors, 64x48 graphics resolution, no lowercase letters (always black on green), audio cassettes instead of a hard drive, and a whopping 4k of memory!!!) I stuck with the 'CoCo' line right through the CoCo III - just when it was getting good they discontinued it. So I gave in and converted to IBM compatibles and Pascal (I have since learned VB, C++, Java and a number of other languages!) I started tinkering, and a few DOS programs (and a bunch of others not useful enough to release) were born. They were the original 'B/W Software' releases, may they rest in peace ;-)

At the U of I, I was a dorm rat, living on the same floor in Allen Hall for five years running (I never drank enough to join a fraternity and didn't feel like doing my own cooking in an apartment at the time...). I studied a variety of things, partly because my major fell into the division of Liberal Arts & Sciences (LAS) and they require a b-r-o-a-d background; and partly because I changed my major 5 times. At one point I actually was a computer science major, but decided at the time that I enjoyed programming too much to let this major ruin it for me. Also, the degree then was geared toward science applications; therefore lots of high-high-higher math. I got as far as the second semester of quadratic differential equations before I raised the white flag. (I finally did go back for a degree as a programmer, 10 years later, and everyone who always said I should be "doing something with computers" said "I told you so". Yeah, yeah, yeah.)

During my last few years there I got involved w/ Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, and through them and the woman who would later become my wife, I became a Christian myself. (I was raised Catholic, but had given it up for lent... story here)

My major jobs (before getting the programming degree) were an Asst. Mgr. at a pizzeria called "Garcia's" (Home of the Flying Tomato Brothers!); Asst. Mgr. at a Kay-Bee toy store (where I learned more about kids in three years than I could have in any other job), a nobody with RadioShack, a Substitute Teacher (talk about fun - you don't know if you're going to work on any given day until 6:30 that morning, and then it's "Be there by 8:00!"), a Realtor and a delivery driver for a pharmacuetical company called Vitalink which supplies medicine to nursing homes (When I want to wake people up, I tell them I used to be a drug-runner.)

Currently, I am working for the North Central Civilian Personnel Operations Center, Department of Army (if you think the name of the place is long, you should see the mailing address!) programming for an 2000/XP environment in ASP/VBScript/Javascript/HTML/DHTML, VB, SQL Server and just a little bit of Oracle (so far.) I have also taught part-time at Black Hawk College. As of this semester I have taught or am teaching Visual Basic, Database Management, the MS Office Suite (an intro class), intro to the AS/400 Midrange computer, and Intro to Programming. Enrollment has been down, so I haven't taught in a while; but I hope to teach again someday.

In my spare time (what's that?) I write these programs, (and revise them, and rewrite the documentation, and tinker some more...), think of new things for this web site, cruise around the net looking for new and interesting links/software/fonts, and play games (who doesn't? ...Currently addicted to Heroes of Might & Magic V.

My wife was raised in Panama, her father is retired military and her mother is a retired teacher (actually Superintendent of the DoD schools in Panama before she retired... which is just before there weren't any more DoD schools in Panama--but hey, that's not her fault!) My wife also attended the University of Illinois (which is where we met) and got a BA in Art History and a Masters in Education. She currently teaches gradeschool in Rock Island and loves it (most days). We were married in the summer of '95.

We have a wonderful two-year-old son who keeps us on our toes constantly. Two introverts raising an extrovert... now there's an adventure!

We also have a cat, Felix. Not much to say about him, but he would want a paragraph to himself anyweay.

Well, now that you've read more than you could ever possibly want to know about me; there's nothing left, right? A picture? Can do...

[A photo of us. Description: I am an average-looking white guy with glasses and a goatee, she is a petite and very wonderful black woman, also with glasses. The child is a happy two-year-old ball of energy.]
Hint: She's the good looking one on the left, the little cutie in the middle is our son... and I'm the other one.

Had enough? Hope so, there ain't no more!

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