So what's to tell? I am currently residing in Hainesville, Illinois. I have worked at various times in Raleigh, North Carolina and Chicago, Illinois. I am currently a validation engineer for a major pharmaceutical manufacturer.
I graduated from Virginia Tech with a Masters of Engineering degree in May, 1995. I received by B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Clemson University, and am now scarred for life due to a compulsion to root for Clemson sports teams and the ACC in general.
I have lived in Missouri, Connecticut, New Jersey, South Carolina, Illinois, and France, and have spent time on the surface of Mars.
My interests are many and varied, yet have the strange quality of changing every time I move. When I attended Tulane University, I was involved in Tulane University Video Access Center (TUVAC), a student television production group, as well as the DJ for the wretched "Global Folk Show" on WTUL-FM. It was really bad, let me tell you, primarily because I didn't know the first thing about folk music except that it wasn't bad to listen to. Anyway, they had an opening, asked me if I liked folk music, and when I said yes, dumped the thing on me. Such is college radio.
When I enrolled at Clemson, I joined WSBF-FM. In my stint there, I served as co-host for Banjos and Bagpipes (a much, much better Celtic/folk show), jazz director, and news reader, and dabbled in production, engineering, and marketing.
When I came to Virginia Tech, I got tired of dealing with student media ("It's like building a twenty-story sand castle. It's great while you're there, but the tide's gotta come in sometime, and then it all seems so pointless."). Instead, I joined the Society for Creative Anachronism. I served as baronial seneschal for a year, resigning in December of 1994.
Following my graduation from Virginia Tech, I spent about six months job hunting in Chicago before moving to the Research Triangle of North Carolina and taking a job with an Internet service provider providing telephone technical support. Five months of that was enough, and I joined a major polyester and adhesives manufacturer in Durham, North Carolina, to be a process development engineer.
After working there for two and a half years, I transferred to one of their manufacturing sites in Morris, Illinois. After a year and a half, it was back to the Raleigh, North Carolina, area to work for a small high-tech adhesives and coating manufacturer, but the difference was that in my time in the Midwest I had met the love of my life, who joined me in the move. After a few years there I was laid off. There followed nearly two years of tough times. We had to sell the house that we had purchased at a loss, and spent a good portion of the time scraping by.
We struggled through, though. I had been trying to break into the pharmaceutical industry for years and when the opportunity came for a contract position at a major pharma manufacturer north of Chicago, I jumped at it. There followed a two-year span of contract positions which, while they provided good income, left an unpleasant degree of uncertainty in our lives. In September, 2006, I was hired full-time by my current employer, another major pharmaceutical manufacturer, and Dan and I have succeeded in building a great life for ourselves.
We are fortunate enough to share a mutual hobby, which is helping to run science fiction conventions, specifically those of the furry genre. We are both on staff for Anthrocon and Midwest FurFest and also create smaller events for our friends from time to time.
I hope you paid attention to the above. There will be a quiz on Monday.
Last updated: 19 December, 2007
Biography