| History |

This will be a web resume, perhaps written in the style of and with a tip of the hat to suck.com.

***

I was born a white boy child on July 17, 1956 in Portsmouth Naval Hospital, Virginia. If you look it up, the day was pretty ordinary for most people, though there were UFO sightings in Colorado and South Africa. Ted Williams hit his 400th career home run. Exactly one year before, Disneyland opened in Anaheim, California, so I can guess they might have been having an anniversary party, but that is speculation on my part.

I share my birthday with actor Donald Sutherland, who is about 21 years older than I am. I do admire his work. I don’t share a birthday with my friend Don Sutherland, but I also admire his work.

We moved to West Virgina the next year, after my dad was done with the Navy and took a job with Union Carbide. Carbide, as it was generally called, moved us on after a year or so, to Manchester, Conn., and then Schenectady, N.Y., where I started kindergarten, and then Bridgewater Township, N.J., where I finished kindergarten and, ultimately, grade school. We left New Jersey in 1969 for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, again at Carbide’s behest. I was in the middle of 8th Grade. I went to high school in Upper St. Clair Township.

I was 18 years old and it was 1974. In other news, it was on that day that the U.S. Justice Department told John Lennon to leave the country within 60 days. (He didn’t.)

Before I was 18, I’d made money babysitting, cutting lawns and, for a few bizarre months, as a door-to-door salesboy emissary of the mighty Fuller Brush Co. (I didn’t know there was a movie, The Fuller Brush Man, until, well, just now.)

My first real job was as a coal miner in the Montour #4 Mine in western Pennsylvania. That’s not the kind of thing you forget. It was real enough, I think; but for me it was just a summer job, not the lifetime it was for a lot of people I met.

(To be continued, obviously? I have 30 more years to cover … arrrggghhh.)

OK. I’m going to do some bullet points, I think … Maybe flesh it out later.

Maybe not.

• I went to Lehigh University for a year-and-some.
• I went to Yale University.
• I worked in the Republic of South Africa for a year in 1977. It was an amazing experience and I think I learned more about … life … there than I did in all four years of college combined. This is where I was, a lot of the time.
• I went back to Yale.
• I worked as a fundraiser for an organization devoted to finding a cure for cystic fibrosis.
• I was a marketing analyst and product manager for a publishing company.
• I helped out on political campaigns.
• I programmed computers, including helping out with some early text games for PCs in the 1980s.
• I became a journalist. I still am one, sort of, huh? But I “became” one in 1984.
• I discovered the Internet.
• I became a dot-com geek.
• I imploded along with the dot-com world.
• I became an author.

This needs a lot of work, eh?

jss @ December 1, 2007