Age 4. This is when I started my life of crime. I became a "second-story man", while visiting a neighbor’s apartment on the second floor of our building. I found a beautiful gold watch in the apartment. The temptation was just too great. I stuck the watch in my pocket and we went back to our apartment. By the time my mother caught up with me I had the watch just about totally disassembled. My life of crime ended abruptly there.

Age 7. In grade school I had a teacher who asked me a question in class. Of course I could not answer because I was not paying attention. She said to me " ...There is no hope for a lazy mind!" I have thought about this over the years and I have finally decided that she was right. There is not any hope for me. However this was a defining moment in my life as I always kept her comment in mind.

Age 9. I received a wonderful gift of an oil painting set from my mother for Christmas. This started my art career and I still paint today. This hobby gives me a good feeling of having done something creative when I am finished with a picture. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees that I am a Master so I have a little difficulty selling my paintings.

Age 10. I had another defining moment in my life when my mother gave me a nice chemistry set. I had great fun with it. I made a lot of different smelly concoctions and some interesting flash powders. Fortunately I escaped this period with only minor burns. The chemistry experiments increased by interest in science and caused another turning point in my life.

Age 13-15. I spent my summers in the north woods of Minnesota near Lake Superior and I learned something about outdoor skills such as hunting, fishing, and hiking. I learned to deep-sea fish (in Lake Superior) for lake trout and net fishing for herring. This period opened up a new world for me and I developed a love of outdoor activities, especially camping. One important thing I learned about survival in the woods is always bring a roll of toilet paper with you.

Age 15. I bought my first car even though I did not have a drivers license. In learned to drive in the middle of winter on snow and ice. I had a friend who would sometimes go with me to give me "lessons". One time we were cruising down a divided highway about 50mph and my friend said: "Turn left." Of course he meant turn left at the next major intersection, but I interpreted the command as "turn left as soon as possible." I saw a highway cross-over coming up and I thought "I can make that!", so I slammed on the brakes and slid over the snow and ice on the cross-over and then slid some more sideways on the dry pavement of the opposite lanes (fortunately pointed in the right direction.) My friend was not real impressed with my left turn technique and he thought it needed more "practice".

Age 15-18. This period was a "big time" in my life going to high school. I got in with a great group of "nerds". Some of them later turned out to be criminals, but at the time it was a good group of friends. I studied classics, trigonometry, and of course, girls. This was another defining moment in my life.

Age 18. I decided to go to college. I could not decide what to major in so I decided to major in "everything", namely physics. (That’s not a medical term by the way.) I decided to go for a BA degree instead of a BS degree, because I thought it sounded better. In graduate school, I studied theoretical physics and took one whole year of nuclear reactor theory. The theoretical physics was a little harder than I thought it would be, so I decided to advance my career by quitting school and going to work in electronics.

Age 25. I went to work for Lockheed in Sunnyvale California. They used a lot of neat acronyms like the ppl, the pph, the qpl, ssd, and others. I worked there two weeks before I knew what I was really supposed to do. So many people worked at the plant that I lost my car in the parking lot several times.

Age 28. Lockheed promoted me, so I decided to advance my career by quitting and going to work for a little back-water technology company in Hagerstown, Maryland. I was stuck there almost 15 years and I still have nightmares that I am back there working again.

Age 32. I got married to my "wonderful and beautiful" wife, Christine. (I learned to say it that way by watching The Wheel of Fortune. ) I quit my job in Hagerstown and we moved to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, so I could further advance my career by working for a small electronic parts firm there. This was my first experience with getting fired from a job the first year I worked there. We moved back to Hagerstown where, unfortunately, I got my old job back. We liked the town though, so we built a new house there. (Never do that!) By some miracle, that house is still standing there today.

Age 41. I quit my job in Hagerstown and moved to Huntsville where I got a job with GTE. I had a great job working for GTE. This was a defining time because this was where my real career as a design engineer started. Unfortunately the plant closed.

Age 49. I was forced to go to work for Chrysler. At Chrysler I did design work on the electric vehicle project. It was a lot of fun burning circuits, frying electric cables with 250 volts and 1000 amps and watching batteries explode. We had a neat fuel cell, but it was kind of "spooky" because it did not make any noise and you never knew when it was going to "blow".

Age 54. My "big mouth" finally got me fired at Chrysler, but good old Intergraph benevolently agreed to hire me and has paid me for 9 years now. Of course Intergraph started losing money as soon as I started working. I hope there is no connection. This was another notch up in my career.

Age 63. Well, I am still working here at Intergraph. I work in the Intense3D graphics group doing simulations and power conversion designs. Finally, at last I have a real career, at least for a while. (Now that I have a career it is time to retire. )

Well, I told you some things about me, but I left out a lot--on purpose of course.

One thing you may note is that I went from Hargerstown, to Harrisburg, to Huntsville. I wonder if my next stop is Heaven or the other place?