I suppose I should write something for the obligatory introduction thread.  I was born in a relatively small town at the far end of the southern fork of Long Island, in the state of New York.  (Actually I was “born” in the hospital over in the neighboring town to the west of where I was conceived and grew up; a minor point that my father used to mention quite often when I was young.)  We moved west when I was in the third grade because my father had gotten a good job at a national laboratory and the commute along the old roads was rather long.

Watching my father who worked with the water coolers that maintained the “Alternating Gradient Synchrotron” I developed a strong attachment to physics.  After graduating high school, I attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and received a BS in Physics with an Astrophysics minor in 1983.

(Fun filled fact:  The only time the New York Islanders ever won the Stanly Cup was when I was attending RPI.  I’m pretty sure that there is a significance here.  RPI is a major hockey college and actually won the national championship in 1985, two years after I graduated.  One of the players of that team, Adam Oates, got inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame last year and became the head coach for the Washington Capitals.  This year we came in second in our division ECAC.)

Well, 1983 was not a good year for anyone, yet alone physics majors.  Worried that my loans were going to be due and payable I sought a last second reprieve by going to graduate school as well as getting a job.  I started working for a small family consulting group while attending Hofstra University who had just started their MA in Computer Science.  I received my MA in 1986.

I worked for the city as a consultant for a few years, taking a slightly lower “salary” under the promise that as a paid employee of the consultant company I would be able to go “on the beach” should my contract expire until they found me a new position.  In fact, they laid me off the moment the contract with Met Life expired.  In a fit of under middle age crisis (I was only 30 at the time so I can’t call it middle age) I took a cut in pay and went upstate to work at an online gaming company.

The owner decided to move the company from Poughkeepsie to Key West Florida and I rode that wave for a good eight years until the company was sold to a small publically traded company in either North or South Carolina.  I decided to come back to Long Island, under rumors of job opportunities that turned out to be false.  I managed to get job with a gaming company known as “Acclaim” and worked there for about a year.  Seeing that my division of the company (getting console games online to the internet) was going nowhere because no console games were at the time providing internet access standard to their games I secured a job at Reuters where I am still working today, albeit as a contractor.

Clubs and groups:  I joined the Knights of Columbus in the 1980’s.  I joined the Barbershop Harmony Society (known at the time as the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America of SPEBSQSA) in Key West in the 1990’s as well as becoming a professed member of the Secular Franciscan Order.  When I returned to Long Island, a friend of mine, who had formerly been chairman of the town planning board and who was currently serving as chairman of the town’s Republican Committee, got me involved in politics.  I am currently a Committee Person for the local town committee, which means I have to walk around collecting petitions every year.  (We used to also record the numbers from the local polling places, but with the new optical systems, this information is sent to the county headquarters faster than we can give them to the local town headquarters so we no longer have to collect that information.)  I also got involved in an event known as “National Novel Writer’s Month,” and have managed to put out a number of fifty thousand word novels in thirty days or less that are all on LuLu so I can print them at my leisure.