I was born on July 9th, 1968, in Princeton, New Jersey. I'm the oldest of three children; I have a brother who is three years younger than I am, and a sister who is six years younger.

The first book I read by myself was Tommy's Camping Adventure. When I was a bit older, some of my favorite books were ones that we'd brought back from the few years we spent in England shortly after I was born; including some of the Ladybird Junior Science Books and the Swallows and Amazons series.

I was also extremely fond of L. Frank Baum's Oz series, and C. S. Lewis' Narnia books. By this time, we were living in Springfield, Oregon, and I was in elementary school. When I was in the fifth grade, we moved about twenty miles south, to Cottage Grove, where — except for a couple of years in North Carolina — I would stay through high school.

I read a lot of old-school fantasy and science fiction during those years; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, J.R.R. Tolkien, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and the like. In addition to our own reading, our mother would read books to us kids that she thought would expand our reading horizons; among others, she read to me Robert Ardrey's African Genesis, which prompted me to go on a minor spree of research into paleoanthropology, and C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.

I went to college at Caltech, in Pasadena, from 1986 to 1990; I lived in Ricketts Hovse, and hung out a lot in Dabney Hovse. I made a lot of good friends at Tech; many of them ended up in the Bay Area.

After graduating from Caltech with a B.S. in mechanical engineering, I worked briefly in Pasadena as an environmental engineer, before moving north to Seattle. I got a job designing office furniture; which I stayed with for a couple of years before going back to school at the University of Washington in 1993, to get a Master's degree in mechanical engineering. This was also where I learned to sail.

With two M.E. degrees, it was inevitable that I would eventually end up writing software at Microsoft for a living. I've been working on Exchange Server since 1997.

A few years ago, for a variety of reasons, I decided it was time to go back to church; I've been going to Saint Andrew's Episcopal Church in Seattle since then, and doing a lot of work with the Sunday School kids. In the fall of 2004, I began attending Seattle University part time, in the School of Theology and Ministry. If all goes according to plan, I should graduate with a Master of Divinity degree sometime in 2010.

In what spare time I have between work and school, I still read science fiction and fantasy. My current list of favorite books includes Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds, and Steven Brust's The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars. I'm also pretty fond of the oeuvre of Barbara Hambly.

When I'm not at home, work, school, or church, I can sometimes be found here. The day after I win the lottery, I'm buying one of these.

In the meantime, I manage to find things to do.