Born on 12/6/53 in Cleveland, OH (ugh!) At age 2 I had the good sense to tell my parents to get me out of there, so we moved to Miami (home of the Dolphins). After graduating high school, like all good nerdlings, I went to MIT. While there, I recovered from terminal nerdiness (see the before and after photos, and take the MIT Nerd Test), got my degrees in Ocean Engineering, and then moved to the Washington DC area. After defense went bust (damn those commies for wimping out), I changed career focus and moved to Noblis, which provides technical and programmatic support to various government agencies. My most significant accomplishment to date is winning more national and world tiddlywinks championships than any winker in history, you can look it up here at the English Tiddlywinks Association's site.

Want to find out if I'm sweating like a pig or freezing my butt off? Check out the automated weather station that sits on top of our office building. It reports a variety of real-time meteorological conditions.

If you only have limited time (or limited intelligence), I've marked the particularly unusual or entertaining with a icon. However, it's ALL good stuff!

Happy Holidays! (Not always timely, but this was pretty good so I left it up) Here's the card we sent out to friends and family. Hope the conservatives weren't too shocked.

Having trouble getting a date? Use my Systems Engineering Approach to Finding a Partner , a term paper I wrote for a systems engineering management class. Download it and distribute it to your nerdy friends who need help. If all else fails, give them a birthday present they'll never forget, an anatomically correct inflatable sheep! Also see a class project that studied Naturalistic Decision Making and Selecting a Spouse.

Bite the big one

After 42.5 years, and probably against my better judgment, it was time to get married. Hope that congress actually does something sensible (that would be a first) and repeals the marriage tax. See our really outrageous wedding page for details on a very nontraditional wedding, and lots of cool travel photos from our honeymoon in Scotland and Iceland.

Yep, that's us. During the year we moved (1995), our home was the least expensive of all the houses sold in the immediate area. Guess I'll move the pink flamingos around to the front. They'll match up nicely with the pink flamingo mailbox. Here's some pictures of our hovel and the surrounding area.

• The Garden Pages, with lots of pictures and descriptions of the plants in the yard.
• A couple of my favorite posters. Don't miss these if you're a liberal.
• A gallery of houseplants.
• Visit Wolf Trap Farm Park, a small national park that has a beautiful indoor/outdoor concert hall, and is only about a mile from our house. It's great to be able to walk to concerts and laugh at all the poor suckers stuck in traffic.

What common household item ...

is an infinite time and money sink that has no redeeming social value? Look here for the answer. Hint: it does nothing but eat, sleep, and whine, and no, it's not my last girlfriend. Or you can go directly to Sprogopolis , a futuristic city with a unique power source.

Shake your booty!

A couple of years ago I was "strongly advised" by my significant other to take up swing dancing. Turns out I really liked it. Not only do you get to hear good music and get some exercise, but you also get to dance with lots of great looking women! Here's some vital dance information for women only. If you're in the Washington DC area, these are a good place to start:

• Swingout DC
• The Spanish Ballroom at Glen Echo Park. One of the area's best places to dance, it can hold 600 people.

Try THAT pickup line next time you're in a bar! I've been playing tournament tiddlywinks ever since I was a freshman at MIT. It's not the game you learned as a kid, although there are some similarities. The tournament game is like a combination of chess and billiards; you have to shoot your pieces to where you want them to go. Check out these links:

• A short guide to tournament tiddlywinks.
• English Tiddlywinks Association's home page. Best source for winks info on the net!
• Article from Sports Illustrated, November 27, 1995.

Get horizontal!

One of the best sports to play (or watch) is ultimate frisbee. Sort of a cross between football and soccer, only with a disc. I started playing in the early 70's (at MIT) and still go out most weekends to kick the younger players' butts. If you're visiting DC and would like to play, visit the Washington Area Frisbee Club website for a list of pickup games.

If you have a good hand, you don't need a partner

Bored with those silly card games like hearts and go fish? Try a REAL game like bridge. It's challenging and fun, plus you can always blame your bad results on that turkey sitting across the table from you. Here's a few links:

• American Contract Bridge League's home page
• An abbreviated version of my Precision System notes.

I'm no pansy ...

But I do enjoy houseplants and flower gardening. Not into pets, though. You can't water a cat and leave it for a week. Some helpful gardening links and interesting photos:

• Behnke's, our favorite nursery
• Kew Gardens, outside London
• The Philadelphia Flower Show. Pictures and more pictures from the show.
• The Titan Arum, world's largest, smelliest flower. We saw this at Fairchild Tropical Gardens, see their page for more info on this unusual plant.
• Fairchild Tropical Gardens. If you're ever in Miami, don't miss this.
• Giant waterlilies at Longwood Gardens.
• Pictures of some desert cacti in Arizona.
• Alpine pinks in bloom, a Sierra Club greeting card.

No, not THAT kind of birdie, you fool. If you want the ones with feathers, go to the next section. This is my "catch-all" area for travel and other photos that didn't fit anywhere else.

• Here's a few of my rental properties
  I visit England at least once a year to play in their major winks tournaments. I also take some time to oversee my rental properties, thus turning the whole trip into a business expense write-off. Want to rent any of these for your next vacation? Click on a photo to see a full size picture.
• Two nice shots of the Grand Canyon, at sunrise and during midday.
• Pictures from our spring 2000 trip to Holland.
• Pictures from our honeymoon in Scotland and Iceland .

Why a duck? Why a no chicken?

If you don't recognize this quote, it's from the Marx Brothers film "The Cocoanuts". We like to do a lot of backyard birdwatching while relaxing on the deck. So far, we've been able to identify about 25 or so different species, but I still have a hard time figuring out the sparrows and finches. Most unusual bird so far has been a bright green monk parakeet!

• Completely squirrel-proof your bird feeders!
• Tropical hummingbirds and butterflies from Butterfly World in Ft. Lauderdale.
• Parrots at the Parrot Jungle in Miami.

It's a bird, it's a plane ...

I always wanted to try skydiving. Once, just to see what it was like. So in 1992 I signed up to do an Accelerated Freefall jump. You jump from 12,000 feet, freefall for about a minute (two jumpmasters are with you, holding your harness to keep you stable), then you pull your chute and float down by yourself. It was a truly incredible experience; I particularly enjoyed the parachute ride. The chutes are very maneuverable and you have time to look at the surrounding area.

The knee bone's connected to the ...

Hope you never have to have knee surgery, but if you want to read about my experience in dealing with a torn meniscus, here's my diary of how it went. Not for the faint of heart.

fools have stumbled across this page.