41 years old here. I currently live in a suburb of Austin, Texas. I've been a software engineer for about 15 years, but didn't start there...
I grew up in Prescott, Arizona, after moving around the country a lot. I spent a couple of years in Aeronautical Engineering school after high school, but decided I had a religious calling (Catholic), so I spent some time in a religious order before eventually landing in a Diocesan seminary (St. Meinrad College and School of Theology, in the little town of St. Meinrad, Indiana). I started a degree in Philosophy there, with a minor in Theology, under the tutelage of the Benedictine monks. After 3 years total, I decided celibacy was NOT for me :) So I went back to Arizona and decided to try my "second choice" career, which was Law Enforcement. I went through the Police Academy and worked as a police officer for a couple of years, but eventually convinced myself to finish the degree I started in the seminary. So I enrolled in Northern Arizona University (up in Flagstaff), quit my job, lived on student loans and grants, and finished the last year and a half of my Philosophy degree there. Wound up with so many credit hours that I had minors in Theology, Natural Science, History, Spanish, and Math along with the BA in Philosophy. After college graduation, my father-in-law-to-be put me in touch with a guy who was a program director at a Department of Defense research lab in Austin, Texas (it happened to be his next-door neighbor...gotta love networking). I graduated in December, moved to Austin with my fiance, interviewed for the job at the lab before Christmas and was hired as a general IT dude in February of the following year. I spent most of my career contracting for the Department of Defense, on various non-sexy classified projects (as 99% of classified projects are), ending with a three-year stay in the Heidelberg, Germany area, working for US Army V Corps (G6) as a software developer. Moved back to the states in '06 and have done primarily private sector work since. As for hobbies, I'm mostly a computer gamer (EQ, EQ2, WoW, etc...if it's an MMO, I've played it.) I'm currently embarking on what I hope to be my next, and final career: writing. I've done a lot of creative writing for the last 20 years, but have had a lot of false starts and stops. I've been working on my first novel for the last 7 months, and will probably have a completed first draft within the next 30 days. It's the first book-length story I've ever been this excited about (speaking of my own work, of course), so I have high hopes that I'll eventually be published. But, regardless of whether or not I ever get paid a dime, I will probably write until I can no longer type or otherwise interact with a word processor. If I don't write, I'm not very fun to be around. Well...I'm often not very fun to be around regardless, but it's much worse if I don't spend time writing :) I've been married for 14 years (will be 14 years on Tuesday, actually), and have an 11-year old boy. He and I are involved in Boy Scouts of America together, ever since I was his first Cub Scout den leader back in his 2nd grade year. Now that he's a Boy Scout I get to hang around in the back and watch him do all the work...which is why I had kids to begin with. Slave labor is free and relatively efficient :) I love music (of pretty much any variety), theater, traveling, drinking (as in trying new things, not coming home and getting pissed every day), good cigars, good pipe tobacco. I don't know half as much as I did when I was a teenager, but my son will soon be in his teens, so our household will once again have a genius within its walls. I'm among the world's worst Catholics, for reasons that will either bore you to tears, or enrage you to the point of wanting to track me down. Oh...and I drive an 11 year old car that's trying to kill me. Nat On Tue, Nov 1, 2011 at 11:14 AM, Tim Hickey <[email protected]> wrote: > Who is everyone? For instance: age, location, job, family, outside > interests? > > >
