My handle is my name - ask me again and I'll tell you the same! :-P

No - really - it is. I live in Texas in a house that was partially destroyed by the floods in 2001 and never rebuilt completely. Then Sears incorrectly installed a brand new A/C unit in our house and now we have black mold all over the place. We got a lawyer - he did nothing for us really and so we are stuck in a house that looks like the insides were attacked by some gang. That is where I live. I've done computer programming since 1972 (10th grade); I've worked at NASA, Exxon, Shell, M.D. Anderson, and several other locations. I helped make comments and submit suggestions when the internet came along and the same for Netscape Navigator. The bug reports were welcomed but the suggestions (like being able to do 2D or 3D graphics in the browser) were rejected with the old "No one wants to do that" kind of response. I used to be really big on Usenet in the Perl, C, Basic, and FORTRAN groups. Finally had enough of the people who were snide or gave out incorrect information - and left. I used to be on Slashdot until some Marketing nutcase started a flame war with me because he said a company was coming out with a quantum physics way to keep people from stealing CDs and I told him he was full of it. So he started a flame war and after getting me listed as a troll, eighteen levels deep into the conversation he admitted he was wrong. His message stated "No one is going to read this deep to see that you are right so I can tell you you were right and I am wrong". So I sent that to the moderators of SlashDot. They reversed all negative points against me and posted his message right after the original posting where I had replied, and banned the guy. Still, just like with Usenet, this really turned me off to going to SlashDot and I have only been back a few times since.

Since then I decided to just go off and do my own thing. I have a dream of making an online game where artists can put their art up for usage and they receive a stipend each month from the money collected. Unfortunately, floods, and lots of friends dying as well as lots of family members dying have kept me too busy to do more than just work for some company so I can pay the bills. I started working on this game in 1982 when I bought my Apple ][+ and one terrible thing after another has happened since then. Not to mention that the three or four times I actually have had it up and running disk crashes have wiped out everything I had done.

Still, even though one of my friends has asked me "Why haven't you killed yourself yet?" because of all of the terrible things that have happened - I am still trying to find the time to work on my idea. I'll finish it one day. It isn't anything fancy really. But I do want it to have permanence so that if something happens - it stays. Like using chalk to find your way through a dungeon. I want the chalk marks to remain. So like in the movie "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (the original) - those marks you cut into the stone will show someone else how to go through the caves and survive.

Anyway - that's me! Queitly working away in the background. All of those suggestions I sent in in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s were always sent as "Anonymous". Not the hacker group - just because I was working at some places where they might have frowned on me sending code or making suggestions. So "Anonymous" was always a good way to send them. :-)