I was born in Boston, Massachusetts on November 21st, 1958. I grew up first in Scituate, on the south shore, and moved to Reading before my father was transferred to Dallas to work for Texas Instruments. My formative years were spent in the white upper middle class town of Plano, where I learned there that money was not an end in and of itself. I also learned just how vapid and banal white people are if left to themselves with almost unlimited funding. It is no surprise that my home town has been the teen suicide capital and has also had a constant problem with drugs. If children are given nothing to pique their interest they tend to find something interesting on their own, or just give up. My parents brought me up well, and I was always given the opportunity to follow my curiosities whenever something interested me. They also taught me that I should do what I loved, and that I should give back to my community. They also hoped I would become a Catholic priest, but two out of three isn't bad. As soon as I could, I escaped Plano. First it was to study psychology at the University of Dallas. Realizing that if I was actually successful and achieved my goal I would have to spend every day of the rest of my life dealing with people who had bad problems cured me of wanting to be a shrink. I had been working at Dallas County Schools as a deaf-ed bus driver while in school, and decided to learn sign language with the intent of being an interpreter for the deaf. I was hired at the Texas School for the Deaf in Austin as a bus driver and spent time studying the language while rising to become the director of the transportation department. I became aware of a sort of "class distinction" in the deaf world between CODAs (children of deaf adults) and "hearies" in the interpretive profession. I came to agree with the CODAs' view that a hearie would not normally become anything greater than a level III interpreter (out of five levels). The reason is because for a CODA, it is a bi-lingual experience, while for a hearie, it is a second language. While in Austin, I had occasion to attend Aqua-Fest one evening and spent an hour or so trying to convince authorities there that there was a serious public safety problem in their setup of passageways between the performance areas. They finally fixed the problem when I asked for the correct spelling of their names so that I could accurately represent it to the media when I told journalists who I had reported the problem to before anyone was hurt. In addressing the problem, I spent a lot of time asking the information booth girl for help. She hasn't stopped helping me yet. Her name is Lisa Gillespie, and we had our tenth anniversary last August. At the same time, my hobby (playing with computers) was becoming more expensive and jobs in that field were picking up and paying well. I realized that to afford my hobby I may have to make it my profession. I went back to school to take some programming courses to show on my resume (all 4.0) and changed professions to become a computer programmer. I was very successful at programming, but found that it tended to be salaried positions, and it also tended to have bad management making promises that they had no clue how to fulfill. I watched a lot of my friends make choices between their jobs and their home lives. Many of them divorced. I also noticed that the people who kept our LAN and desktop machines going left at 5:00 every day. When I asked them, they told me that most computer techs were hourly and got overtime. Since I was working mandatory 84 hour weeks on salary at the time, I reconsidered my initial decision of profession. I had to leave Austin because of allergies, and when I came to New Mexico I decided to be a computer technician instead of a programmer. I still use my programming skills when I see that an algorithmic approach to a problem is the most effective method, but I normally spend my days working to make sure the computers (and the people) I am entrusted to care for work their best. I work now at Presbyterian Hospital, caring for the computers in the Lab. I take my position very seriously, because if they fail, there is the possibility that one of the patients could die. With that in mind, my current prioritization is that I am married first, I have customers second, and involved in politics third. If elected, I would simply have new customers and merge the second and third priorities.