About the Author

That's me, the geek in the computer lab after midnight advocating the use and abuse of Vivarin, two leitmotifs of my adult life, late-night computing and caffeine addiction. The tactic of graveyard-shift caffeine-fueled computing helped me get my B.S., in a cozy IBM Mainframe environment, with it's cadre of acolytes to keep it running, but was disastrous in grad school, where the engineering VAX would crash regularly at nights and weekends. This was a factor in becoming a grad school dropout, as well as realizing that when the East and West Germans were lambada-ing atop the Berlin wall, aerospace engineers would be an unnecessary luxury in the kinder, gentler post-Cold War America.

So here I am, grad school dropout, leaning on my beloved green landyacht (now tin cans) with my then-girlfriend (now wife) Mary. I had a typical slacker career, manhandling the developmentally disabled, temp jobs testing software with no benefits, technical writing/software suport with some benefits, until I left slackerdom and got a slacker dreamjob, with benefits and a 401k, on a software hotline (You mean I get paid to talk on the phone and play with computers?).

I wanted to write something for Enterzone, but the funniest stuff I wrote seems incomprehensible unless you're a Deadhead nethead (though xian has a different opinion, check out One More Solution). I am good at surfing links though, and when I saw Enterzone needed someone to check links, I jumped in with both hands.