The Basics
- I’m 35 years old, married, with one son.
- I’ve lived in Durham for eight years.
- Before I moved to Durham, I lived in Raleigh for seven years.
- I attended NCSU and a small university in Louisiana (Northwestern State in Natchitoches).
- I currently work as a test engineer at Web Performance, Inc., where we do website load testing.
- Past employers include Parata, IBM (through Sapphire Technologies), and Red Hat.
- I have several cats.
- I attend Blacknall Presbyterian Church in Durham.
- My main transportation is a red Yamaha C3 scooter.
Interests
- Global politics
- History
- Economics
- Shooting
Recent Reads
- The Lone Ranger and Tonto FistFight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie
- Guts, by Gary Paulsen
- The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
- Sustainable Energy – without the hot air, by David MacKay
Favorite Reads
- Collapse, by Jared Diamond. Explores how once-strong societies fall apart.
- The Logic of Failure, by Dietrich Dorner. Explores the cognitive traps that humans routinely fall into when dealing with complex systems.
- The Lemon Tree, by Sandy Tolan. The best explanation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ever written, in my opinion.
- The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein. A story of revolution on the Moon.
- I’m also a big fan of local author David Drake, who writes military science fiction and often uses historical backgrounds for his stories.
Personal History
I was born in Oklahoma, but I have no memory of it – my family moved to Montreat, North Carolina, and later to Black Mountain. When I was eleven, my father re-joined the Army and we moved to Fayetteville. After that I lived in a number of places, including three years in Vicenza, Italy, before I settled in Raleigh, first attending NCSU and then working. I’ve been in the Triangle ever since, moving to Durham in 2001.
I have mostly good memories of growing up poor in western North Carolina. My clothes were always second-hand and my sandwiches were always peanut butter and jelly, but I escaped into books at the library, played in the creeks around Lake Susan, and later got into computers.
Moving to Italy was a big shock and a life-altering event for me. I learned first-hand what it was like to be a real outsider, and how arbitrary many of our cultural norms and biases really are. I loved it there, and my mom saw to it that we traveled and saw everything we could. One of my first real economic lessons was on a trip to the former Yugoslavia, where we handed a few dollars to the money exchanger and received back a stack of bills six inches high.
When we got back, I graduated from high school and joined the Army Reserve, doing my Basic Training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri (12B). I was only active in the Reserve for a few months before my unit was disbanded, but by that time I was in college and joined ROTC instead, heading to Airborne School in Georgia, and then moving to Raleigh to attend NCSU. After a few years, I decided that the Army was not for me, and ended up paying back all of my scholarship and leaving school for the work force.
I’ve only been politically active for the last couple of years, and this is my first run for office. Before that I was generally apathetic about politics, although I took my responsibility to vote seriously and kept up with the news. We have, and I have, become all too willing to surrender our responsibilities to others, and along with them our freedoms – not because we should, but because it is convenient, easy, and comfortable. This is leading us down a path where the unspeakable and the unconscionable has become commonplace, and I’m no longer willing to go along quietly. I believe that it is time to take up that responsibility again.
Work History
My first job was at 14 or 15 years old, working for $2.90 an hour in a convenience store on a military base in Italy, stocking coolers and bagging ice (at the time, there was no minimum wage on a military base in a foreign country). I worked at Burger King during high school, and then did a stint as a security guard during college along with a few months working on a highway line-painting crew. My first IT job was working pre-sales tech support at Merisel in Cary, and I went from there into tech support at Red Hat. After Red Hat I worked for myself for a while, and then hired on as a sysadmin contractor at IBM. From there I moved to pharmacy robotics company Parata. I left Parata to work for a internet startup in Apex, where I designed and built a large-scale video delivery infrastructure (think Youtube, but smaller). When that company folded last year, I moved to my current employer Web Performance, where I do website load testing.
