About Me

“Who am I?” Ah, yes – it’s a question that’s vexed the greatest minds of every age, from Aristotle to Erasmus to Jackie Chan.

At its most basic, my answer would be “an earth-bound, carbon-based life form, 51 years in age, male, and of mostly English descent”. But that’s hardly a fun answer, is it? You want to know all about me and my little quirks, like “do you squeeze your toothpaste tube in the middle?” or “what’s your position on the serial comma?” or “do you dip your fries in your Frosty at Wendy’s?” Patience, grasshopper: the answers to these and many, many questions follow.

Please enjoy the pretentious page on my website where I tell you all about me:

As mentioned, I am 51 years old and live in the United States: North Carolina to be particular and just outside Charlotte to be (somewhat) exact. I am originally from the South, as you might have guessed by my capitalization of the “S” in “South”, which is something only Southerners tend to do.

Being reared in the South, I was brought up as a Methodist and thought that you had to bring a covered dish to get into heaven. Around the age of 24, I figured that God doesn’t really want my tuna casserole, so I became an Episcopalian. Now I just call myself an “Anglican” and occasionally attend St. Michael the Archangel Anglican Church in Charlotte. The whole “Episcopal vs. Anglican” thing results in puzzled looks from people and long explanations about how the Church of England became the Church of America, why they call it “The Episcopal Church” instead of the “Church of America”, what the difference is between an Anglo Catholic and a Roman Catholic, why female priests are a problem, and why the Anglican Communion just doesn’t have a pope to straighten all this mess out. In the end, it seems that Grandma was right all along: now I just keep my mouth shut any time religion gets brought up.

I juuuusssttt barely graduated from Duluth High School in Duluth, Georgia. As a student, I was known for being brilliant in classes I enjoyed, like history and English. In fact, I might have been the only Duluth High student to ever utter the words “Ezra Pound? Hell yeah!” I was, however, asleep in classes I didn’t like, such as math and Spanish. This might explain why I received a 120 in World History and a 16 in Spanish on the same report card – at the time, a record spread of 104 grade points.

Because of my wildly unbalanced high school performance, I began my collegiate life at DeKalb College, which is now known as Georgia Perimeter College. From there I transferred to, and received a bachelor’s degree from, Georgia State University. My degree is in political science, which is why I now fix computers for a living. As I understand it, the only degrees more useless in the real world than political science are art history and anthropology, so if you’re still pondering which major is for you, please take that into consideration.

I love history… it’s the greatest soap opera ever, and if kids think a TV show like Gossip Girl was “daring” or “out there”, you haven’t read up on Elizabethan England.

While I loved history since I was a child, it wasn’t until I saw the BBC documentary series Connections that it all came together. The show was hosted by James Burke, a man who made my brain explode by pointing out that events don’t unfold on a single timeline, like you might see in a history textbook. They occur on thousands of timelines, each of which is connected to other timelines in some shape or form. Instead of a single straight line, history is like a web where one can take a specific event – like a Louisiana doctor’s attempts to cure malaria – and connect it to year-round beer production in Bavaria and to the development of the rocket engine.

Of course, one of the reasons that people don’t care for history is that history requires a good storyteller. If you’re that type of person, I suggest checking out books by Giles Milton. That guy could write a 20,000 page history of the paper clip and it would be the most exciting thing you’ve ever read… seriously.

One thing I loved about college was that I took classes in both “film appreciation” and “music appreciation”. If you ever have the chance to take classes like these, you really should. It’s worth the effort.

Having said that, I actually don’t watch near as many films as I used to. maybe 2-3 a year? One at the cinema? What I am interested in is TV, and that’s mainly because of the Internet. You can download most any English language TV show only hours (sometimes minutes) after it airs in its home country. Thanks to the Internet, my TV watching is no longer restricted by borders. I can watch British shows like Ashes to Ashes or The IT Crowd, or Australian shows like Underbelly or Rush or Canadian shows like The Border or Being Erica or whatever else strikes my fancy just as easily as I can watch something on NBC or ABC. And a decade later it still amazes me that I can do this. Back in the late 1990s, I envisioned a world where every TV show ever made in every country would one day be available on demand. Although we’re not quite there yet, it really is becoming true.

As far as music goes, I grew up on British New Wave bands like Duran Duran, The Jam, The Police, Madness, The Cure, New Order, and Depeche Mode. Then I turned into an angry teenager in to punk bands like Sex Pistols, The Clash, Dead Kennedys and The Meatmen. But then I mellowed out and started listening to local bands like R.E.M., Drivin’ N’ Cryin’, Guadalcanal Diary, Dreams So Real, and Pylon. At around 18 I started going to clubs and got into the whole dance music thing, which I listened to for years and years.

While we’re here, here are a few acts I like. Maybe you’d like them, too: Cocteau Twins, Emiliana Torrini, Saint Etienne, CHVRCHES, Marsheaux, Sylvan Esso, Gliss, Ladyhawke, Flunk, Beach House, Washed Out, The Raveonettes, La Roux, Blonde Redhead, The Golden Filter, Still Corners, and dozens of others.

There several other things I like:

American football is one. And by “American football” I specifically mean the six-time Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers. I’ve been bleeding black and gold since I was around 4 years old, which makes me a 37-year fan of “Blitzburgh”. You might wonder how a kid from Atlanta became a Steelers fan.: as a child I loved the Atlanta Falcons and the Steelers about equally. But then, in 1982, the Falcons fired Leeman Bennett, their winningest coach to that time. This was the last straw for my dad, who had a long string of grievances with the Smith family. He swore off the Falcons forever, and I, being an 10 year-old kid who thought his dad knew everything about sports, went along with him, leaving only the Steelers. And I’m still here all those years later.

After professional football, my next favorite sport(s) are college sports, specifically the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. In fact, not more than five feet away from me right now is a plush toy football with an embedded music box that plays “I’m a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech”. My dad put it in my crib when I was a baby. It was the first song I learned, and my childhood memories are filled with Saturday afternoons at Tech games. I’m also still debating whether my last words will be “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee” or “To Hell with Georgia”. So yeah, the love runs deep.

Growing up, my Dad thought hockey was a “weird Yankee sport”, so I didn’t get to go to any Atlanta Flames games. However, my high school best friend was from DC and was a huge Washington Capitals fan. We watched NHL games on cable, and were overjoyed when the minor league Atlanta Knights came to town. We easily went to a hundred Knights games, but then the Atlanta Thrashers ran the Knights out of town and brought NHL prices with them. A Knights game – complete with ticket, parking, and three 16 ounce beers – would barely set you back $25; a Thrashers game was at least triple that. I was so pissed about the whole thing that I vowed to never pull for the Trashers ever. So now I pull for the Pittsburgh Penguins in the NHL and the Charlotte Checkers in the AHL. And the Trashers have moved to Winnipeg… so hahaha, NHL!

Something else I like is cheese. I consider myself a “cheese enthusiast”, and am especially keen on British cheeses like Stilton, Wensleydale, Red Leicester, Caerphilly, Cheshire, Derby, Double Gloucester, Windsor, and, of course, real Cheddar. I’m not opposed to French or Italian cheeses, mind you. It’s just that those two cultures have a bazillion cheeses between them, while Britain only has a few. So I figured that I’d try as much of the British stuff as I could before taking on the “big boys” of cheese.

I also think it’s important to make a distinction between “food snobs” and “food enthusiasts”. “Food snobs” make a cheesesteak sandwich with imported Wagyu beef, cheese handmade by virgins in the Italian Alps, and have their own plot of wheat in the backyard that they grind themselves to bake into rolls. “Food enthusiasts” just go to Pat’s Steaks like normal people. While I enjoy all sorts of food, especially ethnic restaurants, I don’t get uppity about it. Hell, get a couple of beers in me and I’ll shoot Easy Cheese straight into my mouth. And the missus will be proud, lemme tell you.

Speaking of “the missus”, twelve years ago I fell head over heels in love with a girl from North Carolina. I think it’s because – in addition to being amazingly pretty – she says sweet things like “HAY-air” (“hair”), “come owwwwnn!” (“come on!”) and “hosepipe” (“garden hose”). She also doesn’t seem to mind that I snore like a tiger with sinusitis and am as graceful as a drunken elephant in Tiffany’s. She laughs at my stupid jokes, thinks I’m smart and doesn’t grumble too much when football comes on. She loves the Trainspotting soundtrack as much as I do, orders veggie burgers with bacon, only eats soy sauce from those little take-out packets, eats ice cream with a fork, listens to ABBA without guilt, needs the sound of a box fan to fall asleep and sometimes uses a hair dryer on her feet when she gets cold. She even likes grits and country ham too!

I also like to travel. I’ve been all over the place… such as the places in light blue below:

One of my all-time favorite vacation moments – aside from walking into Three Rivers Stadium with my Dad for the 1980 AFC Championship game, or seeing the Great Barrier Reef in a glass-bottom boat with my Mom – was driving on the Autobahn in Germany. Sure, it was only in an Opel Kadett… but it was a rented Opel Kadett. And, as P.J. O’Rourke once said, “nothing handles better than a rented car. You can go faster, turn corners sharper, and put the transmission into reverse while going forward at a higher rate of speed in a rented car than in any other kind”. So even though the Kadett – Germany’s answer to the Ford Escort – wouldn’t go much faster than 130mph, it was still awesomely cool to just cruise down the highway at that speed with no fear of the cops… and get passed by cars going much faster than that!

Let’s see… what else? Well, I’ve been monkeying around with computers since I was around nine years old, which makes me fairly ancient in this line of work. My main problem is that I never specialized in anything. Once I graduated with that “mostly useless” poli sci degree, I needed to find a career path quick. Computers provided the fastest way to do this, so I got a job working the phones at Digital Equipment. Great job! Too bad they sold out to Compaq.

Lacking a CS degree or any specialized experience (like, say, Java programming), I’ve had some interesting jobs: the train wreck that was working for IBM, desktop support for a company that was bought out so often that employees had coffee mugs that said “I love working for…” with the company’s eight previous owners crossed out, a great job involving television networks and satellite dishes where I was often asked to buy $40,000 worth of hardware to play with, and one company where I was sent all over hell and back to fix things that I usually didn’t understand. Ah, and you wonder why us IT people tend to have short fuses and act like Nick Burns, “Your Company’s Computer Guy”!

Lastly, in real life you can usually find me at such Charlotte hangouts as Sir Ed’s The Diamond or Pinky’s. If you ever go to any of those places, maybe you’ll see me there! And thanks for reading this far!

Oh, and to answer the questions from the beginning of this article:

“Do you squeeze your toothpaste tube in the middle?” – I did when I was younger, yes. But now that I’m older and wiser, I squeeze from the end.

“What’s your position on the serial comma?” – Even though I was taught that correct usage included serial commas, I rarely use them today… unless the things I’m listing are long and confusing, in which case I’ll use it for clarity.

“Do you dip your fries in your Frosty at Wendy’s?” – I used to, but the Wendy’s in Belmont is kind of crummy, so I don’t go there very often.