I was born June 19, 1963 on Ramey Air Force Base, near San Juan Puerto Rico.  Before moving to Illinois, I lived in Michigan, Louisiana, and Texas.  I graduated from college with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Louisiana State University in Shreveport in 1988, got married to Susan in 1994, and now have a family and work as a software engineer in the heart of Downtown Chicago.  

My dad was an career Air Force man so we moved around a bit before settling in Bossier City, Louisiana in 1970.  My mom was, and still is, a registered nurse.  My dad is now retired and runs a cattle farm in East Texas, on a ranch I named myself as a child, "WWR - Worth While Ranch".  Since I lived in Louisiana from 1970 - 1990, I feel like I grew up there.  My parents still live there and I visit when I can.   My sister Tammy is four years younger than me and is also a registered nurse, continuing the Trainer tradition of teaching Labor and Delivery classes at LSUMC.

I got interested in computers after taking a intro computer science class as a freshman in college in 1983.   I soon began to save for a Commodore 64, which I immediately wrote countless programs for.  I may have been one of the first (and only person crazy enough?) person to have written a program to render fractals on my C64.  See the article titled Machines I've Used for a thorough description of my experiences on these early machines.

I was always wild, but in spite of all this I somehow managed to graduate from Parkway High School in 1982, then again from college in 1988.  I taught at a two year technical school called Southern Technical College for a year before moving to Dallas Texas, where I accepted a job as a Unix applications support programmer.  While in this role I provided OS support and programming services for several large  corporations, which allowed me to make many trips to Boston, San Francisco, Toronto, Cleveland, and Chicago.  It was great to see these cities, and in many cases experience the best they had to offer.

After three years I finally took my second Dallas job, working for I-Concepts, which provided Unix applications and OS support for the British Consulates throughout North America.  I was now on the road for 2 weeks at a stretch, each and every month.  In spite of being gone so often, I made many friends, and enjoyed a wide range of activities including building models, flying Radio Controlled  planes, building and completing a HO scale train layout, and riding my mountain bike.  

While in Dallas, I met my wife, Susan, and shortly after getting married we moved to Illinois.  In mid 1996 we had a custom home built in the west suburbs of Chicago.  We now have three kids- Karen, Chris, and Michael.  We also have an easily excitable two year old golden retriever named Maggie.  Visit the digital camera page for pictures of the kids and dog.

These days I work in downtown Chicago, and in the evening love playing the piano, working on the web site, building and running HO scale trains, taking pictures, C programming, web surfing.   If only there were more hours in a day. 

In addition to the piano, I have a Yamaha S80 as the heart of a small home studio that allows me to burn audio CDs of the songs I write.  I have another web site I created dedicated to the keyboard: www.yamahaS80.com.  It may seem crazy, but I could listen to my own songs all day long.  But every time I listen to one of my songs I hear a little something I should have done differently.

The Big Stick 40, my RC (Radio Controlled) airplane, needs several repairs before it can be flown again.   In fact I'm thinking about retiring this airplane because it has been crashed and rebuilt several times, making it quite heavy and somewhat unstable in the air.  Lately it's been shelved as time for this area has grown short. 

I have built a few HO scale model train layouts, and I already have a Model Train Page dedicated to my work in this area.

While working downtown Chicago, I worked at Trans Union for 3 years and then at the American Medical Association for 2 years. I was also at CNA Insurance for a while.  While at the AMA I wrote C programs on a SUN E10000 to load physician data into a Informix database.  Earlier this year I was using C/AIX for IBM SP/2 Systems to load credit data for Trans Union.   The I was placed at First Union Securities converting their Unix based Informix Stored Procedures to IBM DBII format.  While consulting for First Union I was offered a job, which I took just as the corporation was purchased by the 93rd largest corporation in America, Wachovia.  I'm currently working there as a programmer on their Data Warehouse. 

As a consultant, I have gained lots of experience in Chicago.  At night, after the kids are put to bed and I'm not totally beat, I work on my web site, play games, research the web, answer email.  I have a wife and kids and a long list of hobbies that keep me very busy.  

I've been addicted to computers since 1983, when I purchased a C64 as a freshman in college.  I changed my major from criminal justice to computer science, and have been writing programs ever since.  I have 16 years programming experience, most of it in C.  But it all started with that simple 64, and it's ironic but at the time you think it's going to last much longer than it did.   The C64 lead to the C128, then the Amiga, then the P90, P200, P300, and PIII450 systems I've bought or assembled since. 

Use the links on the left to see my family, read about the web site, or examine my resume.