I am a fifty-something application developer, devoted husband and father of two lovely daughters living in Callaway, Maryland. That's not far from the Patuxent River Naval Air Station (Pax River), about 50 miles south of Washington DC (that's right across the bridge from the Tiki Bar for all of you who have wandered down to Solomon's Island to partake in that annual spring insanity).

I grew up as an Air Force brat, moved around a lot as a kid, eventually settling down in Las Vegas, where I finished high school and went to UNLV before moving to Maryland with my wife Pat in 1985, where we have lived since.

I am currently employed as a senior web developer/analyst for a professional services firm working with the U.S. Navy.

I also still own and maintain my own company, Tekquest which has been around for eight years providing development and hosting support for projects involving the maritime energy shipping industries.

I have been involved with application development for twenty years now, first in the desktop arena using FoxBase+, FoxPro and Visual FoxPro, and then the last ten years as a web developer. My first web application was built for the Energy Information Administration (Department of Energy) using Visual FoxPro in 1996. I was asked to research other technologies which could eventually be supported by in-house staff in case I was hit by a beer truck crossing the street. That was when I discovered ColdFusion and this has been my primary development tool ever since. We currently run both CFMX6.1 and 7.02 servers, using MS SQL Server 2005 running on Windows 2003 servers for most of our work. I like to dabble with new technology and have experimented with .NET, Ruby on Rails, and recently Adobe Flex, which I think is going to be huge. I am also currently looking at Blue Dragon .NET as a CFML environment, since we are using strictly Windows servers at this time.

I have authored one article for the ColdFusion Developer's Journal, a review of the Plum Framework, of which I am a big fan.

I have worked Windows platform for most of my career, although I did do a stint on a Macintosh way back in 1984-87. I am really dating myself here, but I first used a Mac Plus, then an SE and finally a Mac II. There was very little database work to be had on a Mac back then, so we moved to Windows. I honestly have never even seen a Linux box, and have never had a client who had one either, to my knowledge.

For recreation, I like to road cycle and kayak. I have had many knee surgeries and broken ankles on both legs, so I can't do anything involving running anymore. I try to get 60-80 miles in a week, which is way down from the 200 miles I used to do. I discovered too much time on the road interferes with the constant need to feed the technology beast.

Musically my tastes are somewhat eclectic. I basically love any music where there are actual musicians playing who know how to play instruments, and play them well. That includes the West Coast sound, progressive rock, jazz, some country, bluegrass and especially jazz fusion. I love improvisation, especially on the guitar and if I am seeing somebody live, I don't want them to play the song note for note like it is on the record. I don't have much respect for groups who sound great because of a Pro Tools engineer but suck when you see them live. My favorite groups/musicians in no particular order include Steely Dan, Toto, Pink Floyd, Los Lobotomys, Jimi Hendrix, Focus, Yes, Steve Lukather, Larry Carlton, Michael Landau, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Allan Holdsworth, Derek Sherinian, Al Dimeola and Jean Luc Ponty, just to name a few. My kids have gotten me into some of the current stuff, and I like Porcupine Tree and Incubus as well.

My political and religious beliefs are my own and I don't plan on discussing them on this blog (shoot me if I do!)