I currently live in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA, having moved here in 2000. Previous residences include Pennsylvania, Colorado, Michigan, California, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee. My family and I enjoy the smaller city environment here, especially after seven years fighting traffic in the Philadelphia area. We are also glad to be closer to both of our extended families… especially since we now have two grandchildren (they live in Chelsea, Michigan).
I started attended church within a week of being conceived. I was raised Southern Baptist, and would still offer the Baptist Faith and Message as a summary of my foundational understanding of God, salvation, and the Christian life. I’m “between churches” at the moment. Though my faith in God has not changed, my opinion of churches and many “Christians” is beginning to show some age.
I have been involved in church choirs for most of my life since junior high. During my later college years and throughout my 20s, I was involved in some small Christian bands (as a vocalist, I can’t play any instruments well). I have directed youth choirs and served as Music Minister in several churches; except for one stint for less than 2 years, all the positions have been volunteer, and I prefer it that way.
I have been a programmer / software engineer for over three decades… since back in the days of punched tape and punched cards, the late ’70s. I began in 1976 with college courses on BASIC, Fortran, and APL. As an undergrad, I wrote programs (in all three languages) for the Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science Departments at the University of Louisville. 
As a graduate student in the Atmospheric Science department at Colorado State University, I developed programs in Fortran and actually wrote some of the earliest code for processing geostationary weather satellite imagery and analyzing it on special purpose hardware developed by the Electrical Engineering Department at CSU (that hardware being the ancestor of the video card in your computer). I gradually became more interested (professionally) in computer programming, particularly the up and coming field of image processing. Thanks to CSU, I attended a couple of the early SIGGRAPH conferences. That finally spurred me, in late 1980, to leave atmospheric science and pursue the fields of computer graphics and image processing in the “real” world.
Over the course of my career, I have worked at: Lockheed Missiles & Space in Sunnyvale, CA; Ford Aerospace Western Development Lab in Palo Alto, CA; Gould (Deanza) Imaging & Graphics Division in San Jose, CA (my favorite job); The Environmental Research Institute of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI (later became Veridian and now part of General Dynamics); Geodynamics Corporation (became part of Logicon, which became part of Northrop Grumman) in Englewood, CO (they subcontracted me for extended periods to: Ball Aerospace in Boulder, CO, and Martin Marietta (become Lockheed Martin) Management & Data Systems in King of Prussia, PA); ITT Aerospace & Communications Division in Fort Wayne, IN; Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems, Advanced Decision Systems Technology Center in Fort Wayne, IN; and now back at ITT, but at the Advanced Engineering & Sciences Division (now Advanced Information Systems) Fort Wayne office.
For several years, my primary software language has been C / C++ (preferring GNU compilers to Microsoft Visual C++, though I use both), and I have dabbled in Java. I am also well-versed in using XML, HTML, CSS, and PHP. I have contributed to a few open-source software projects, most of them hosted on sourceforge.net.
 I am Elrond, who are you? | ||
|  IN-AL-99 |
