So what's his deal, anyway?

A lot of people wonder how you reach a point like this. Well, you start as a staff announcer at a small 5,000 watt radio station in Fresno, California.

Oh wait, that's someone else.

No, actually you start as a kid in the 19(mumbles)'s in Iowa. Remember Gateway computers? With the cow-spotted boxes? Well we're from the same town! And one day you discover a file called QBASIC.EXE on your Gateway 2000 386. And once you've finished playing a dozen or so hours of GORILLA.BAS you take a look at the code and try to figure out what the heck it's doing.

It's all downhill from there.

You spend pretty much every waking moment thinking about computers. You go to school for computer science, and eventually you find yourself as a consultant in America's insurance capital, Des Moines.

Eventually, you find your way to Chicago, where you work for a financial services consulting company, building and running their documentation system, among other things. Then you end up at a