See also: my home page, or who cares?.
I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, where I had lived almost all my life before moving to Boston in fall of 1997. In July 2000 I moved to Ottawa. In Feb 2006 I moved to Whistler.
In Edmonton I attended Delwood Elementary School, then Dickensfield Junior High School and Queen Elizabeth Composite High School.
I first started geeking around at Dickensfield in 7th grade (on Apple II computers with 48K of RAM), writing things in Apple Basic. We were only allowed to play games that we had written ourselves, which motivated us to learn more so we could write things that would be fun to play. (related stuff: Hertzfeld's folklore site has interesting bits on early Apple/Mac stuff, as does Beagle Bros Online Museum, xu4 - Ultima IV Recreated, PR#6)
After High School I enrolled in the Computing Science program at the University of Alberta, where I had lots of fun hacking around on MTS when I should have been studying. MTS was so unbelievably cool. One day I'll write it up in detail.
Midway through finishing my degree I moved to Toronto to work for IBM Canada as a technical writer for 16 months on a student internship program. It's actually quite amazing that I didn't discover the Web back then, as I spent a fair bit of time dealing with various proprietary hypertext products, looking for something to use for our online help system. The book I wrote was marked up in IBM's BookMaster language; this was my first introduction to structured markup. I'll write more about this someday, too.
I went back to Edmonton in fall of 1993 to finish my degree, and it wasn't until January 1994 that I discovered the Web while working on a project to put some news archives online. This is quite late considering the Web started attracting a fair bit of attention in late 1993; extremely late compared to most of my current colleagues. I was instantly hooked and haven't really been able to concentrate on anything else since. This prolonged my University career somewhat, as I couldn't bring myself to think about boring stuff like Calculus and Numerical Analysis. Anyway, I was finally able to get my CS degree and begin being a full-time Web geek. (More details are available on my resume, if you're interested.)
Hmm. I'd like to reorganize all this, but for now, there it is.
Misc stuff that describes my personality, more or less:
@@ add notes on TV/movies: simpsons, lebowski, letterman, conan o'brien, X games
Some of my close friends that have web sites:
(hmm... I should move that somewhere else, but where?)
I chat about various things with some of my friends on the fogo discussion list.
I also keep track of pages about me elsewhere.