Apparently Heidi did not like Chicago very much because soon after she was born we moved to Little Rock, AR! My earliest memories are of playing with some of my friends on Birchwood Drive in Little Rock. Mom and Dad must have been happy in Little Rock because a few months after I turned 3 my brother Eric was born.

A few years later I got a small part in a television commerical for a product called Chef-Way cooking oil. Our neighbor across the street worked for an advertising agency and needed a little boy for an upcoming commercial. It was pretty neat to see myself on TV and I got $100 to boot! Wow!

Well, after that I had pretty much done all that I was going to ever do in Arkansas. So we packed up the family and moved to Bowie, MD. That fall I went to 2nd grade at Yorktown Elementary School in Mrs. Johnson's class. I continued on through elementary school at Yorktown and became good friends with a guy named Chris Weigant. We were both in accelerated math classes and the TAG program at school.

Eventually I had learned all that I could at an elementary school and was ready to move on to more advanced studies at Samuel Ogle Junior High School (which is now an elementary school). There I learned how to work a combination lock, how to solve complex geometry problems, and how to surrender my lunch money when asked properly.

I enjoyed my junior high school years. I played soccer every year on the local Bowie Soccer Association team. We were not very good however. Every year we seemed to win only one game. I think that I may have scored one or maybe even two goals in my career. Oh well. I had fun. I was also involved in the school plays at Ogle. During this time I became good friends with Geoff Jugle and Joey Parsons.

In 1980 it was time to get serious. Junior High School was over and it was time to start thinking about the future. Time to start thinking about a career, a wife, a family and so forth. Well, maybe not all of that stuff. But it did seem pretty serious at the time. I began my advanced education at Bowie High School.

High school was a blast. I became real good friends with Bob Bogely, Eric Granahan, Ron Stone, and Pete Suddeth. We did lots of crazy stuff together. In the summer of 1982 we all got jobs at the brand new amusement park in the area that had just opened up - Wild World. It is now called Six Flags America.

I was active on the school tennis team, in the school plays, and I filmed the football and basketball games for the school teams. During my senior year I was accepted at the Rochester Institute Of Technology in Rochester, NY.

So, in the fall of 1983 I headed to upstate New York. Let me tell you one thing about Rochester, NY. It is really cold. I had fun there though. My roommate was a guy named Ted Coustenis. We got along real well and ate lots and lots of pizza together. I entered RIT as a math major. However, during my freshman and sophomore years I really majored in eating pizza and playing ping pong.

So in January of 1985 I decided that I had wasted more than enough of my parent's hard earned second mortgage. So I quit college and got a job driving a delivery truck for a local film developing company called District Photo. This was a time of unparalleled wealth in my life. I was making almost $7/hour, living at home, and had very few expenses. Unfortunately I invested most of my money in mid-80's vinyl albums which don't seem to be worth much today.

It didn't take very long for me to realize that driving a truck at District Photo wasn't going to take me very far. So in the fall of 1986 I enrolled at the University Of Maryland. But this time I was paying for school. So I got a part-time job waiting tables at a restaurant in Beltsville, MD called TJ's Of Calverton. I slowly worked towards a degree at UM by taking about 3 or 4 classes each semester. I got back in touch with some old friends from high school - Pete Suddeth and Dave Nichols - at UM. They were both taking classes there and we spent many days blowing off classes perfecting our Hacky Sack skills.

I continued working at TJs and going to school at UM. In the fall of 1990 I met Jennifer Gerlitz at TJs. It was love at first sight! Well, maybe not love, but definite mutual attraction. Alas, after only a few short months, Jennifer told me that she was more interested in some fraternity dude. So we went our separate ways. (Sniff, sniff)

It didn't take long however before she had learned the error of her ways and came crawling back begging me to take her back! (At least that's how I remember it) In May of 1991 we started dating again and on Sunday, November 17th, 1991 we got engaged! It was around this time that we started attending Cedar Ridge Community Church. We were married on June 13th, 1992 and after our honeymoon cruise, we moved into our first apartment in College Park, MD.

I graduated from UM in December of 1992 and then got my first professional job as a junior database administrator at Jaycor in Tysons Corner, VA in February of 1993. In February of 1994 we left College Park and bought a townhouse in Germantown, MD.

Our lives changed forever in December of 1995 when our first daughter, Abbey, was born. That was a moment that I will never forget. In November of 1996 I left Jaycor and went to work as a consultant at Automated Concepts, Inc. in Reston, VA. It was around this time that we became good friends with Michael and Teresa Thomas. I learned a lot at ACI and this was where I really got into programming for the first time. I was very fortunate to be able to help a guy named Scot Johnson edit a book that he was writing on Active Server Pages.

Just when we had finally adjusted to being parents and things seemed to be calming down a bit, along came our second daughter - Emily! After a longer labor she was born on March 17th, 1998. Another moment that is etched forever in my mind.

While at ACI I also became good friends with my boss, Lynn Yohn. He helped me a lot also with learning this web page development thing! In June of 1998 I left ACI and headed to Proxicom in Reston, VA to be an Active Server Pages programmer. However I never really felt at home at Proxicom and so in September of 1998 I left Proxicom and headed to a company called Iconixx in Bethesda, MD. Lynn had left ACI and gone to Iconixx also and wanted me to come work there. So I was hired as a Senior Web Developer.

By the summer of 1999 we realized that our townhouse was just too small to hold our growing family. So we started looking into buying a single family home. Our friends the Thomases had purchased a house at a new development up in Frederick, MD so went up there to check it out. In February of 2000 we moved in to our brand new house.

In late 2000 the Dot Com bubble was beginning to deflate very, very quickly. The company that I was working for, Iconixx, had managed to go through $80 Million worth of venture capital and had a really nifty office, a ping-pong and foosball table, but very few customers and very little work. So Iconixx closed it's Bethesda office and I got my first (but not last) taste of being laid off.

Fortunately I was able to find a job right in Frederick working for First Nationwide Mortgage Corporation as a Senior Web Developer. The great thing was that I now only had a 10 minute commute!

Just when the kids were growing up a bit (Abbey was 6 and Emily was 4) and able to take care of themselves a bit more and Jenn and I were able to relax a bit along came baby #3! On May 21st, 2002 after a long labor, Brooks Thomas was born. Now we were out numbered. There were more kids than parents. It was time to switch to a zone defense.

For some reason I must have not had enough stress in 2002 because in October First Nationwide was purchased by Citigroup. Citigroup had no need for software developers at the Frederick location so it was time for my annual Fall job search again. Yes, I was laid off once more.

This time I got really lucky because I found a job at Computer Enhancement Systems in Frederick. And now my commute was only 2 minutes! I was hired on as a Software Engineer and am in charge of starting and building the software development side of the business.