About Me

If you know me in person, by now you know that I can be a strange individual with quirky social interaction modes and a rather unusual sense of humor.  Maybe I can explain a little of what happened to me.

 

Timeline

  • 1984: Born in Chicago, IL
  • 1985?: Moved to North Carolina (so I'm told)
  • 1988: Moved to Los Angeles
  • 1993: Moved to Spokane, WA
  • 1998: Moved to Garrison, TX
  • 1999: Moved to Campbellsburg, IN
  • 2004: Began attending Vincennes University
  • 2005: Began attending IUPUI
  • 2006: I moved back to Los Angeles and enrolled at PCC
  • 2008: Successfully matriculated to UCLA
  • 2009: I get engaged to the most beautiful woman in the world
  • 2010: I get married to the most beautiful woman in the world
  • 2011: Graduated from UCLA with a BSEE

 

Religious History

I was born to very religious parents.  My mom and dad met each other at Hyles Anderson, which is a baptist bible college.  Growing up, I had my first conversion experience at age 4.  My second conversion experience was around age 9, shortly after watching a terrifying movie about people getting executed for being christians during the Tribulation.

I grew up considering myself to be a christian.  I became very interested in science at a young age and was going to be a Creation Scientist when I grew up.

Around the age of 18 I took my siblings and some of their friends to a youth rally at some church we knew of.  I was already starting to have trouble with many of the obvious lies that were being forced down my throat.  One such lie was that one sip of alcohol or one puff of a cigarette was enough for you to become addicted.  On and on they went about the evils of all these sinful activities.  Sometime during the second hour of the sermon it suddenly dawned on me: what if it was all bullshit?  I mean, what if it wasn't just a lie here or a lie there but what if the whole religion was just a big lie?  For the first time in my life I was capable of imagining a world without a god.  I had an experience that was more real and gripping than any of my conversion experiences: I had experienced de-conversion!

I began doing some research on religion, the inerrancy of the bible, and the logic of believing in the supernatural.  One important book that I read was "The Age of Reason" by Thomas Paine.  In less than one month after deconverting I had become an atheist.

Technical History

I credit my love of learning to being an only child for 3.5 years.  My mom was a stay-at-home mom and spent all her time reading to me and interacting with me.  I learned to read at a very young age and never stopped.

I was around 9 or 10 when I bought a meteorology kit at a toy store.  It was the coolest thing ever.  It had a weather vane with a wind speed indicator, a rain gauge, and a chart of different types of clouds.  That was my first real exposure to science and I was hooked.

Around this time I also started watching old B&W movies about famous people like Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur, and Thomas Edison.  The movies about Thomas Edison (starring Mickey Rooney and Spencer Tracey) especially got me interested in Morse Code.  I started building my own telegraphy sets and unsuccessfully trying to teach my younger brothers to communicate back and forth with me in Morse Code.

When I was 11 or 12, someone that my dad worked for gave me one of those electronics kits that you can buy at Radio Shack that has the little springs next to each component and little wires to connect the different components together.  This is also about the time I began teaching myself high-school biology.  My career goal at the time was to become a "cytologist."

After teaching myself biology, I moved on to chemistry.  I had had a chemistry set as a (younger) kid, but now I moved on to high-school level stuff.

At the age of 13 I was exposed to my first book on Ham Radio.  It was a book that explained how to build your own radios that you could use to communicate in Morse Code to people all over the world (!!!!).  While I was shopping for parts at Radio Shack, I bumped into a member of the local Amateur Radio club who told me about how I could get an Amateur Radio license.  I got my first licence at the age of 13, callsign KD5FEG.  My first license was a Technician Plus. Shortly thereafter I upgraded to General and then to Advanced.  It was another 2 years before I upgraded to Extra.  I built my first radio when I was 14.  It was a Ten-Tec 40 meter CW only kit.  I had a lot of fun talking to people all over the central US in Morse Code with that kit.