My Past: I was born on Saturday, April 6, 1968 at Proctor Hospital in Proctor, Vermont, U.S.A., making me 34 years old. My Father is Mohawk and French, while my Mother is Irish. She actually grew up in the Southwest of Ireland in a wonderful little town called Killorglin. I've visited there with them twice, and I hope to visit there myself many times over the course of my lifetime. It's a wonderful place full of nice people. I tend to take after my Father's side of my family more than my Mother's. I have one Sister, who is three years older than I am
We moved around Vermont a bit before coming back to my Father's hometown of Northampton, Massachusetts I've lived here in Northampton since, with the exception of 9 months that I lived in Boston, Massachusetts for school.
I went to Ryan Road Elementary School, which was later named for the man who was the principal while I was there, so it's now known as the Robert K. Finn Ryan Road Elementary School. If anyone deserved to have a school named after him, it was Bob Finn who was very dedicated to the students of his school and treated us not only as any one of 600 and some-odd students, but also as people, individuals, and even friends. He is someone that I can honestly say I miss. I started smoking cigarettes when I was 10..which was in between fourth and fifth grades.
After elementary school I went to the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Florence Junior High School, which has since been renamed the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Florence Middle School. I took up playing the Saxophone in seventh grade, and it's something I enjoy quite a bit, along with most things about music.
I attended Northampton High School for 4 years, graduating in 1986. I took quite a few courses and even had some really good teachers while I was there. It was during this time that I figured out that I'm gay and started learning to deal with it. By the end of my senior year, I had been "out" for several months. I was in the musicals the first 3 years of high school, those being Anything Goes, Once Upon a Mattress and Bye Bye Birdie I elected not to be in the musical the last year because the director's methods for choosing who was in the musical and what parts they played was highly dishonest and didn't sit well with me. I did end up with on the cast list, but dropped out after finding out that people who didn't audition were given parts. It was during these years that I first started using computers, and shortly thereafter that I started programming. My family got a Commodore 64 computer when I was a sophomore in high school, back in 1983, when the Commodore 64 was the king of the computer world. I made some friends who also had computers, and I'm still friendly with most of them. We used to have parties where we would swap software, we modify our hardware for different purposes. It was a great deal of fun! I learned much more from hanging out with my friends than I learned in Computer Science Class. Most of my friends were also in Band class, or were in some way musically inclined, and every once in a while I'd actually do something musical with them. We were a pretty close-knit group. Being gay, I was the odd-one-out a lot of the time... it was a lot easier to deal with once I was out of the closet.
My first year of college I attended Berklee College of Music in Boston, Massachusetts where I studied Music Production & Engineering, was cofounder of CUAB (Commodore Users at Berklee), and I was a founding member of BUGLE (Union of Gays, Lesbians and Everybody Else at Berklee) [Yes, I realize it's out of order.. but Berklee doesn't allow the school's name to appear as the first word of any student organization, and change the acronym to "UGLEB" just would have been a bad idea.] I learned a great deal more about music in my 1 year at Berklee than I had in the 6 years I'd already been regularly involved in music, including the fact that I don't have quite the drive necessary to be a full-time musician. After coming home from Berklee I got involved in musical projects with my friends a great deal more often than in high school. I, of course, was involved in a lot of music projects while at Berklee.
My second year of college, I switched gears drastically by transferring to the Criminal Justice program at Greenfield Community College in Greenfield, Massachusetts. I finished my Associate of Science in Criminal Justice in 2 years and graduated in 1989. The course work involved was fascinating. Psychology, Abnormal Psychology and Sociology were some of my favorite courses. I wanted to be a police officer at this point in my life, and got a job with a local town as a communications operator for the police and fire departments, which I held for six and a half years or so. It was a job that was often boring, but fascinating when things picked up. There were times that were very difficult to deal with emotionally, and it was very stressful, but I had experiences from that job that I just wouldn't have had otherwise.
 I got my first IBM-Compatible computer sometime in 1987. It was a 10Mhz speed-demon with a whopping 640K of RAM, a math coprocessor, and 20 megs of hard-drive space. I had already been using a computer with a graphical user-interface for quite some time, since I used the GEOS (Graphic-Environmental Operating System) on my Commodore 64, which had 675K of RAM, and multiple floppy drives. I could actually have as much as 1.1 megs of disk-storage in use at once. I kept using my Commodore for mission-critical work as well as playing games, and used my PC mainly for calling BBS's (Computer Bulletin Board Systems) Eventually I had to move to using either Macintosh or IBM-PC Compatible... I chose well & ended up with a PC instead of a "MacInTrash." thankfully. I've learned a great deal about them, I love playing with them, and I have done some consulting. |
Who I Am Today
Please ignore most of this... it's now February of 2006..and I just took a look at this & realized that it's insanely out of date!
Maybe someday I'll update it.
I choose not to drink for the most part. If I go out specifically to "go drinking" I might have one or two drinks over the course of a few hours. I don't use any drugs, not because I'm particularly an anti-drug person, but I'm the type of person who's prone to becoming addicted to things.. as evidenced by the fact that I started smoking at age ten and kept smoking regularly until age 29 with only 1 break of about 14 months when I was 15. I quit smoking, hopefully for the last time, on September 9, 1997. I prefer not to drink, nor smoke. I now tend to be rather anti-smoking. I can't stand the smell of cigarettes anymore. Visiting my parents' house tend to be somewhat uncomfortable because they both smoke rather heavily and the smoke really gets to me after a while. When I get home from there, I have to change & shower immediately after coming in the door because I feel awful and smell worse.
I started on a diet as of the first day of the year 2000. I cut out sweets, breads and pastas. As of March 8, 2000, I have lost around 20 pounds and 2" off my waist. I look and feel a lot better than I have in years. I have taken up studying Taekwon-Do at the Robert Giorgio School of Taekwon-Do in Wayland, MA, and getting lots of exercise really has helped me lose some of the weight. I have also toned up quite a bit since I took up Taekwon-Do. I enjoy it, and I'm becoming more flexible, agile, and I'm learning self-defense. I've wanted to study some form of Martial Art since I was very young, but had never gotten around to it.
I work doing Lotus Notes programming and administration as well as website design, but you can go read my resumé if you want to find out more about what I do for work. Most recently I have worked in the IT Information Security department of
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For me, an ideal date is going out somewhere & doing something fun with someone who's nice to talk with, and likes to share experiences. Something like a day at Riverside Park (or an even more fantastic amusement park..maybe... Disney World ;) ), or a day hiking, or biking, or going out to a movie & dinner. I don't consider going out to a bar & having a few drinks to be either romantic, nor fun. Going out and dancing for a little while isn't too bad.. provided that there's music that can actually be danced to...which is hard to find. I don't consider jumping up and down flailing one's arms to be dancing, I consider that to be jumping up and down flailing one's arms. Dancing involves coordination, a sense of rhythm, and grace.
I tend to carry around a Palm Pilot Professional. (A Personal Digital Assistant from Palm that is based on the Palm-Computing platform) It's a wonderful little device that keeps track of lots of little things. It synchronizes with Lotus Notes very well, which is good for me since that's what I use to keep track of just about everything on the computers I use, so it's nice to be able to keep the data up-to-date between all my devices.
I have several computers around my house. The first is my laptop, which really doesn't stay around the house all the time. My second machine is a Lotus Domino server that I use for development & testing, the third is my main computer at which I sit to do work. For the kind of programming that I do, having multiple machines is very necessary, but I'd probably have that many if I did something else for a living because I just plain love computers.
I'm a big fan of science fiction, space-fantasy in particular. I've always been fond of the likes of Star Wars, Babylon 5, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Space: Above and Beyond, Space 1999, and other similar shows, movies & books. I tend to read books that are completely unlike what I like to watch. The Andromeda Strain by Michael Chrichton is one of my all-time favorite books. Mercedes Lackey's Last Herald Mage trilogy. (Magic's Pawn, Magic's Promise and Magic's Price) I also very much enjoyed her Herald's of Valdemar trilogy. I've never read anything by Tony Hillerman that I didn't love. His mystery novels are wonderful. The Lance and the Shield by Robert Utley was a riveting biography of Sitting Bull. I think my single all-time favorite book is one of the only space-fiction books I've read, other than the occasional Star Trek novel. Contact by Carl Sagan (of Cosmos fame.. and if that doesn't get you then the most-quoted thing he ever said will, "billions and billions") is a book that I've enjoyed reading, and re-reading. I think I've read it four times now, and every time it's been just as good as the first, although I remember a bit more detail each time. The movie was rather disappointing to everyone I know who has read the book. I also love The Rocky Horror Picture Show although I haven't seen it in a theater in many years..and although I have it on videotape..it's just not the same thing. |