I've always thought it a bit presumptuous to write bios about yourself. But as long as I am presumptuous enough to put up this site, I figured I might as well have a short "about me" section.

I was born in Salt Lake City, UT to LDS parents. We moved around (Arizona, New Jersey) until I was four years old, when we settled in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which I call home. My father was a banker, my mother, a homemaker and interior designer. I have three siblings, all younger.

I began studying music at a young age, and excelled at piano and theory. When I was 12 years old my family bought an Apple ][; it didn't take long for me to learn Basic and basic assembly and begin programming games. Early in my formal education I did very poorly in school, but excelled at aptitude tests. In high school, I failed several classes and had a sub-2.0 GPA. I considered dropping out of high school more than once, but retained my desire to continue my education due mostly to the wonderful music and drama department (Rebecca Wyffles) at the school, and the influence of one particular person, Darrel Danner. Today it remains my belief that formal education has no provision for passionate, self-directed learning, were it not for the personal interest of wonderful teachers. During high-school, I also studied Jazz Piano with James Hamilton for a time.

After graduation, I served a mission for the LDS church for two years in the Dominican Republic, which I also call home. :) Upon my return I enrolled in a community college, and transfered after a year with a 4.0 GPA (ha!) to BYU. At BYU I studied piano performance with Paul Pollei, founder of the Gina Bachauer competition. In 1995 I met my wife, Marie, and we married December 28th of 1995.

Shortly before our marriage I quit college and began Clockwork Internet, Inc. to engage myself in the growing popularity of the Internet and my fascination with Linux, which I began using in 1993. I taught myself HTML, then Perl, then C, then C++. Clockwork Internet and its software projects were acquired in 1999 by an awesome company called Ciceron Interactive. Today I am employed as a software engineer at Verio, Inc., and am also active with many of my own software projects. I was a columnist for The Perl Journal, a quarterly publication about the Perl programming language, and I am an active member of the Open Source software community. My resume is here.

My son Garron was born in 1997, and my daughter Tess in October of 2000. Being a father is my single favorite thing. We currently live in Woodland Hills, Utah.

My hobbies include any and all games, snowmobiling and skiing, model railroading, astronomy, magic, and almost all non-fiction. I am a scuba diver, with a PADI rescue diver certification.

While in Minnesota, I believed strongly that I was a conservative. Since moving to Utah, I've realized I'm rather moderate, bordering on liberal. It's all about setting. Beyond all that, I can probably be summed up (for better or worse) by my likes and dislikes.

Things I generally like:

• snow and trees
• games
• jazz, opera, classical music
• kids
• sushi
• farmers
• watching basketball, football, baseball
• The Simpsons
• most non-fiction
• cats
• trains
• religion
• C, C++, and Perl programming languages
• FreeBSD & Linux
• skiing, snowmobiling, and diving
• talking
• libraries
• steak

Things I generally don't like:

• MTV
• peas
• television news
• careers
• VB and Java programming languages
• people who think religious people are stupid
• people who think atheists and agnostics are stupid
• politics
• psychology
• most fiction
• school
• people that don't use turn signals
• Utah DMV engineers
• bookstands