About Me
I was born in Wichita, Kansas on October 19, 1963. When I was eight, we moved from Wichita to the community of Spring Branch in the Texas hill country north of San Antonio (in Comal County). I graduated from Smithson Valley H.S. in 1982 (check out my school yearbook photos!), spent 1982-83 as an AFS exchange student in Großklein (yes, that's the real name!), Austria, a small community south of Graz, not far from the Croatian border.
I started college at The University of Texas the in the fall of 1983, graduating with a B.A. in German in 1986. I completed a Ph.D. in German Cultural Studies/Translation Studies at the University of Texas in 1997, having spent 1990-91 in Constance, Germany, doing dissertation research.
I have a wife and two lovely kids. Katie and I met when I was in seventh grade and she in sixth. We went steady all through high school and married in 1985. Our daughter Hannah was born in 1994, and Samuel in 1999. We have a cat named Norman, and two dogs , Tippie and Xena.
I got started in software development in 1993 as a computational linguist working on machine translation software. I've since moved into development of web-related applications and web sites and moved back home to Austin. In addition to my day job (see my resume), I co-own Aphids Communications, a small web site development and design company, and do software application development as an independent contractor.
