Where to begin? Let's start at the beginning. I was born on October 31^st, 1978, at Willamette Falls Hospital in Oregon City, Oregon. I lived in Gladstone, OR (a town of 10,000 just north of Oregon City, or for those of you who don't where that is it's a few miles south of Portland) until after I graduated from Gladstone High School in 1997. From 6^th grade until I graduated from high school, I played percussion in the Metropolitan Youth Symphony; I also played percussion in the GHS band and sang, played keyboard bass and played drums (not all at the same time!) in the GHS Swing Choir.

In fall of '97 I moved to Phoenix, AZ so I could attend DeVry, majoring in Computer Information Systems. In summer of '98 I dropped out of DeVry after deciding that DeVry was charging me entirely too much money not to be teaching me what I really wanted to know while making me wade through stupid business stuff I had no interest in. I got a job in technical support/customer service at Inficad Communications, learning a lot more than I was at DeVry. I tried going back to school at Glendale Community College to take some computer programming classes, but it turned out I didn't have enough time to both take classes and do homework, partially because of how long it took me to get there (from work to school took an hour and a half on the bus). So I dropped out of GCC as well.

After about a year at Inficad, I was hired to do system administration by a new start-up ISP; unfortunately that eventually fell through. So I did various temp jobs, and finally wound up working for Earthlink doing broadband technical support, which I did for nine months.

In the summer of 2001, I moved back to Oregon and my parents moved to Guatemala. They had been thinking of traveling, and my mother decided that the best way to do it would be for her to get a job somewhere, so somebody else could pay for the travel expenses. She sent applications all over the world, and landed a job teaching music at an American international school in Guatemala City. A year later my father passed away suddenly, which was quite a shock to all of us.

I now do freelance computer work, and I work for the Metropolitan Youth Symphony as their percussion manager.

My first computer experience was a community school class at Gladstone Elementary School where we learned programming concepts with BASIC and Logo on Apple IIe computers. Years later, I started using Macintoshes, messing around with MacPaint and working with MIDI. When I was in 6^th grade, my grandmother got a 286 with GW-BASIC and some old version of MS-DOS; I got a book on BASIC programming at the public library and had hours of fun. Later that year, I discovered my Apple II floppy disk from that class I'd taken years before, and soon figured out how to use an Apple II again. Much of my free time during my 7th grade year was spent in the Apple II lab at school.

My eighth grade year, my school replaced the Apple II lab with a Macintosh lab, so I stopped doing programming, and turned to graphics - and then I discovered HyperCard. HyperCard is an amazing tool; it's a shame Apple never figured out what to do with it.

At some point I was given a Commodore 64 and a TRS-80 Model 100 laptop. I accomplished some amazing programming feats on both; I was most proud of the TRS-80 program that played music in four-part harmony by rapidly playing each part one at a time, fast enough that it kinda sounded like the different parts were playing at the same time. I got it to play Pachelbel's Canon in D.

In 1995, my friend Dan and I wrote our own programming language and compiler. We never got very far, but it does run; I've occasionally poked at it over the years and fixed a few bugs. We found a book on 8086 Assembly language by Peter Norton (yes, that Peter Norton) at the public library, and write a compiler in QBASIC to translate programs written in our invented language into assembly, then run DEBUG to translate that into executable machine code.

In 1996 I taught myself HTML and the basics of Perl, and helped to build and maintain my high school's Web site. This was an excellent experience that probably changed my life; for the first time I got really interested in the Internet and explored just what it is I want to do when I grow up (no, I'm not there yet). In addition to HTML, JavaScript and Perl, my experience in high school also gave me exposure to Linux.

During my Senior year of high school, I got bored in math class, so I wrote a Chess game for my TI-82 graphing calculator. You couldn't play against the calculator - it just managed the board in a two-player game - but it did understand all of the rules of Chess, including the weird ones like en passant. While I was at DeVry (and profoundly bored in computer class), I developed the Chess game further, fixing (hopefully) all the bugs. It looked something like this. Sadly, one day the batteries ran out and the chess game was lost forever.

After dropping out of DeVry, I started running Slackware Linux on a 486, and set it up as a server on the Internet. I named it Boffo. Don't ask why. Boffo has been running ever since then, although most of the hardware has been replaced at least twice and it's currently a dual PIII/450 system. The server has at least 20 active users, accepts around 12,000 pieces of e-mail per month (a third of which are filtered as spam) while rejecting over 50,000 SMTP connection attempts from blacklisted IP addresses, and handles about 30,000 HTTP requests per month. Certainly not a large volume as servers go, but they sound like big numbers to most people.

I am now running SlickHosting.com, offering professional Web hosting services to businesses and individuals who want their own domain name. Sorry if this sounds like an advertisement, but, well, it's an advertisement. I've had phroggy.com hosted there since February 2001, and have been pleased with the service myself. I'm not biased or anything, really! Go sign up! Pay me money.

If you'd like to know more, e-mail me!