5 Skeletons...

...better left in the closet (until now). In his new tell-all post, your host reveals some of his deepest, darkest secrets:

 

1. I never graduated from high school. I ended up getting my GED (which I passed with flying colors) after I got married. Education became uninteresting because I wasn't learning anything new, so I left. That, and the vice principal said she'd call the cops if I were ever seen on campus again. Apparently she still held a grudge from when me and a friend hit her with his car. It was an accident, I swear! He couldn't see her because I was obstructing his view, being on the hood of his car and all.

 

2. I'm really close to inventing a machine that produces electricity via magnetism and doing it with no moving parts. At least that's what the research shows. Reality usually has the bad habit of showing you the error in your calculations that you've missed. I've got another machine I want to prototype that I think would be useful, too. It's a scalable motor driven from high pressure air which is modeled after the Wankle design.

 

3. I'm a big NASCAR fan and have been for many years. Selling auto parts as my job keeps me close to racing, too. But, what you may not know about me is that I used to own a race car. I guess its been about 12 years since I owned the car (a '78 Camaro). I had this dream that I'd make my way into Winston Cup and rub elbows with the likes of Rusty Wallace, Dale Earnhardt, and Jeff Gordon.

 

4. I married my high school sweetheart. Its been over 15 years since I said, "I do" and I'd say it again in an instant. Wanting to keep life simple, we got married on our two-year 'going-out' anniversary, so we've really been together for over 17 years. We have no kids--just pets. What was weird was to visit our old high school this last Christmas, being there for my niece's Christmas program. (Don't tell the VP!) Seeing all those old familiar haunts brought back memories of when we were first dating. (Sigh...)

 

5. I've been writing software for computers since I was about 13. My first bit of coding was hammered out on a Commodore Vic-20 (which I still have somewhere). From there, I moved to the Commodore 64, then to a PC sporting a super-fast 33 MHz processor. (Do you realize we now have pocket calculators with more processing power than that?) All my programming knowledge is self-taught, too. My programming language of choice is Basic. For a long time, I wrote programs in QBASIC but never had a compiler so I eventually migrated to Visual Basic. In addition, I've dabbled a little in C and Perl, but prefer VBScript and JavaScript. Of course we mustn't forget our old friend HTML.

 

Well, there you go. Maybe one of these days I'll tell you the story about the time I almost got run over by a train...