Look, are you really sure you want to do this? Don't you have enough problems of your own without reading about the insanity of others? No? Okay, but don't say I didn't warn you.

I was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania on September 11, 1957 as part of a desperate, highly secret attempt by the U.S. government to stop the Soviet Union from launching Sputnik 1. The project failed slightly more than three weeks later, of course, and the fact that it also unleashed me on the world makes this project the most disastrous of the Eisenhower Administration. In an attempt to conceal the extent of the disaster, I was spirited to the small village of Pennsville, Pennsylvania (about 5 miles north of Northampton), there to be raised by a kindly, eccentric, heretofore childless, middle-aged couple.

The first few years of my life were spent engaged in perfectly normal little boy behavior: Breaking things, torturing any animals or insects unfortunate enough to cross my path, trying to set fire to things, and generally being a nuisance to every other inhabitant of the planet I came in contact with. At school they taught us about planets and orbits, but I wasn't buying any of it. As an only child I was absolutely certain that the entire universe revolved around me. (This is a certainty that few, if any, only children ever outgrow.)

Just before my fourth birthday I suffered my first asthma attack. Things went slowly down hill for the next ten years. Between my 13th and 14th birthdays I spent more than eight months in various hospitals in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, coming close to dying on several occasions. The local pediatricians said I had the "worse case of asthma they had ever seen." The Philadelphia allergy specialist in charge of my case wasn't nearly as impressed. You literally had to cough up a lung to get that guy's attention.

When I first came down with asthma the doctors told us that I'd probably outgrow the disease by the age of 12. They also cautioned us that I had a good chance of coming down with hay fever around the same time. They turned out to be half right. I came down with hay fever right on schedule, but kept the asthma as a bonus. By the age of 14 I was a bitter, sarcastic, self-dramatizing little creep. No wonder I was so popular in high school!

I've wanted to be a writer all my life. Apparently the publishing bug has also been with me for a long time, although I refused to admit it to myself until recently. As an elementary school student I "published" a newspaper called The Pennsville Blast, typing two or three copies of each issue on a Remington portable electric typewriter. This served as my start down the long road to carpal tunnel syndrome.

As a teenager I delved into writing poetry, which is to be expected. Most of it was purely awful, which is also to be expected. I did have one poem published, I think. In 1977 a magazine called Teens Today paid me the magnificent sum of one U.S. dollar for a poem called "Try To Be Me". I never received my contributor copy, so I don't know if the poem was ever published. The check did clear, so it wasn't merely another cruel joke played by an uncaring world on a hapless, angst-ridden teenager.

One odd thing, though. As soon as that one dollar check was cashed I lost all interest in writing poetry. It was almost as though I was only doing it to prove to myself that I could get published. Once that goal had been achieved, the fascination disappeared. Either that or my angst wandered off to ride someone else when I turned 20 a few months later. All I know is that I didn't write another line of poetry for 12 years, by which time I was safely in my thirties.

Dropping out of college in November 1975 after an entire two months of what could only laughingly be called "work", I spent my late teens and early twenties drifting through life in search of something to really grab my attention. My parents, needless to say, were less than pleased with this turn of events. I worked at a series of minimum wage jobs, endlessly annoyed that the world failed to recognize my inborn genius and hand me the fame and fortune I so clearly deserved.

As a longtime admirer of Benjamin Franklin, it's just too bad I wasn't familiar with a certain quotation of his at that early point in my life:

Genius without education is like silver in the mine. - Ben Franklin

Trying (and failing at) one "get rich quick" scheme after another, I also spent time exploring educational opportunities. I took some real estate courses and became a licensed Realtor Associate in Pennsylvania. My realty license arrived in the mail during the early summer of 1979, the same week the prime rate hit 20%. An exceptionally well-timed career move, as usual.

Working part-time for a Century 21 office in Allentown, PA., I spent my summer evenings wandering around that steaming subject of a Billy Joel song with an experienced Realtor. We were trying to convert FSBOs ("For Sale By Owners") into listings for our firm. People would look out their windows, see us coming up the walk in our gold blazers, and not even bother to answer the door. At best we'd hear them yell through the open windows, "Go away, we're not interested!" They knew what we wanted, since we were probably the 212th and 213th realtors to visit them that day, all for the same purpose. Why any of us were bothering is beyond me, since nobody could afford to buy a house at the mortgage rates being quoted at the time. That ridiculous gold blazer may still be stashed away in a closet somewhere. I look stupid in gold.

When I wasn't working on some failing way to make more money, I played tournament chess, a game I took up seriously in high school. Too lazy to master the game, I helped organize tournaments and mostly tried to overlook the extent to which I found life one big continuum of tedium. While bumming around the Allentown Chess Club I met a rather odd teenager by the name of Greg Borek. We eventually discovered that we had a frightening number of things in common and became close friends.

Greg's friendship has had a profound influence on my life. For one thing, he introduced me to another game which became more important to me over the years (at least from an artistic viewpoint) than chess ever was. Greg's older brother Teddy belonged to a newly-forming fantasy roleplaying group. Greg became involved, and one day in September 1979 I was invited over to the Borek manse to try my hand at something called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Enter the hapless Almach. The AD&D party I joined needed another cleric, so a more experienced player helped me roll up just such a character. His highest score, 13, was placed on wisdom. Throwing a first time AD&D player right into playing a spellcaster is cruel, but I didn't know any better. Since all the players in the group were relative novices, neither did anyone else.

Almach really symbolized my life at that time. He was a person with some potential who blundered around with no bearings or landmarks, never quite knowing what to do about the crazy situations in which he found himself. He was so focused on making the correct decision that he would often fail to make any decision at all. None of this is too surprising, since AD&D characters always share a large measure of the personality of the player running the character (unless the player happens to be a great actor, which was never a danger in this case).

Eventually the members of the party attained knighthoods, through some bit of chicanery or another, and we all had to come up with noble names, like "Sir Salazar the Vindicator" or some such malarky. True to my nature (and Almach to his), I couldn't decide on a noble name. So I settled for "Sir Almach the Indecisive". The joke quickly wore thin, but it didn't matter much. Shortly thereafter, just after reaching 5th level in his profession, Almach became a late night snack for an owlbear.

Even more important than the game itself, which was fascinating enough, was the group of real people I was playing AD&D with. The group included several fine actors (most notably Bruce Balliet and Greg Borek), and featured a brilliant actor/storyteller, Todd Furler, as our primary dungeon master. These people, who I am proud to count as friends, taught me as much about characterization and storytelling in a few years of fantasy roleplaying as I've learned from a lifetime of reading great (and not so great) literature.

Did I say a "few years" of fantasy roleplaying? We still get together to play games once or twice a year, although these days the game is more likely to be Torg or Illuminati. Some of us have families now, and all of us have adult responsibilities. Our old AD&D group may contain a diverse range of personalities but we all have two things in common. We are all non-smokers, and we all went into computers as a profession.

I gave up school again for a couple of years after the real estate fiasco. In the summer of 1981, however, I made a decision which was to completely change my life. I signed up for two computer courses during the Fall 1981 semester at Northampton County Area Community College (NCACC). It's a damned good thing I took both courses, as it turns out.

The first course was "Introduction to Data Processing", and was one of the most boring classes I've ever had the misfortune to sit through. The problem was not so much the course material as the instructor. (Doesn't it always seem to come down to that?) This guy was a DP "professional", a systems analyst with a major local corporation. He was friendly enough, but his teaching "technique" consisted of reading out loud in class the chapters of the textbook we had been assigned to read in preparation for that class session. Just a little bit of that goes a long, long way... mostly towards making my teeth ache.

Mercifully the other course was "Programming I", which allowed me, for the first time ever, to get my hands on a computer. It was a DEC PDP 11/70 minicomputer running UNIX and a Pascal compiler written by a member of the faculty. By the second week of the semester it was clear that something special was happening to me. This stuff was fascinating! I was jumping way ahead in the textbook, my mind awhirl with the logical possibilities of the new language I was learning.

A whole new world was literally opening up before me. And this was a world that I could understand. (At long last!) By the time we were given userids and taught how to logon to UNIX and navigate through the system (3rd or 4th week of the semester) I had coded a Pascal program to calculate changes in my United States Chess Federation (USCF) rating. As soon as I learned how to use the UNIX text editor I eagerly typed in the hand-written code of my program and ran it through the Pascal compiler. Tingling with excitement, I checked the output of my first ever program compilation. Every single line in the program was flagged with a syntax error.

What the hell? I knew I was jumping way ahead of the lesson plan (we were officially coding the old "Hello World!" program), but I couldn't have misunderstood this stuff that badly! How could I mess up the #$%@# "PROGRAM" statement? I wanted ever so desperately to ask the instructor about my program, but didn't want to rock the boat. This instructor was more than competent, even to the point of being somewhat inspiring (He told us that "Lazy people make good programmers because they always find the shortest way of doing things. In computers, the shortest way is usually the best way." Go, team!), but he was a stickler for "keeping to the schedule" and not jumping ahead. Aaarrgggh!

Stretching my minuscule patience level well beyond the breaking point, I hung on until it came time to actually type in our first official program. At this point the instructor announced that although our textbook showed all the Pascal reserved words in upper case, the home grown Pascal compiler we would be using actually required all Pascal reserved words to be typed in lower case. Aaarrgggh, indeed!!

After class I took a couple of minutes to actually type in and compile my "Hello World" program, just to see what successful compilation output looked like. Then I went crazy re-typing all the Pascal reserved words in my rating program in lower case. Another compile...just three or four errors! Within a few more minutes I had my program running, a program far more complex than any official program I was asked to code during my first two semesters of programming classes.

By February 1982 it was clear to me that I had finally found the profession I wanted to pursue. I spoke to my parents about going back to college full time starting in Fall 1982. They could tell that I was really pumped up about this programming stuff, but they had seen me that way before. They agreed to help as much as possible, but they approached the whole situation with an "Oh, no. Here we go again!" attitude.

The Pennsylvania State University demonstrated that it was on a definite downward slope academically when it granted me admission as an undergraduate computer science major for the Fall 1982 trimester. I entered with about a half-year's worth of transfer credits. (Why those real estate courses weren't accepted for credit towards a computer science degree is beyond me.) The plan was to attend the Allentown branch campus of Penn State for a year to pick up some general education courses, then head for the main campus at State College for the last two or so years.

The first thing I discovered was that classes at a major research university aren't nearly as easy as classes at a community college. The second thing I discovered was that I was allergic to calculus. This allergy proved to be a major problem. I studied calculus like mad, even to the detriment of my work in other courses. My parents hired a tutor for me, and Greg (a wizard at math) helped whenever possible. (Greg was going to school in Pittsburgh by this time, so he wasn't around all that much). Even with all my work and all this help, I only managed a "C" in that first semester of calculus. It wasn't even a solid "C", but a sickly, hanging on by its fingernails kind of "C". (I was used to cruising my way to straight "A"s at NCACC.)

Penn State requires computer science degree candidates to complete four or five courses in advanced math, including 3 calculus courses, differential equations, and linear algebra. A barely squeaking by "C" in Calculus 101 did not bode well for my chances of getting through this program. I was going quite insane during that trimester break. Here I was, finally knowing precisely what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and my utter inability to handle advanced math was going to wreck the whole thing! I started talking about changing my major to psychology, and my parents began chanting, "Oh no. Here we go again!"

Fortunately I found a flyer from the Capitol Campus of Penn State in Middletown, PA. laying around my room at this time. I had picked up the flyer from their display in the Penn State/Allentown Campus lobby when they came around recruiting for their programs. Most Penn State branch campus students automatically head for the University Park campus in State College for the last two years of their bachelor's degree programs. The two other four year degree-granting campuses of Penn State, Capitol Campus and Behrend College, have to actively recruit students from the branch campuses and community colleges in the state. It just so happened that Capitol Campus offered a "Computer Applications" major as part of their Bachelor of Business Administration degree program. Interesting. Even more interesting was the fact that their BBA program required only 3 credits of calculus. I already had that! Sold! I changed my major to business within the first week of the Winter 1983 trimester.

The next two and a half years were a blur of classrooms, libraries, computer centers, exams, all-nighters, and 7-11 hot dogs at 3 AM. Along the way I managed to fall in love with a young lady who eventually married my roommate, so I was keeping busy. In late May, 1985 I put on a cap and gown for commencement from Penn State/Capitol Campus. I would have preferred to give the whole thing a miss and get my degree in the mail, but my parents insisted. Their chanting days were over at last!

This is where I was in the story when the site went public. I'll write the rest later...

...But I do want to make one point perfectly clear... I've been a mainframe systems programmer for nearly twenty years now. In all those years of installing operating systems, coding assembler programs, and monitoring critical online systems, not once has it been necessary for me to resort to calculus! So all I have to say to the math geeks running the PSU Computer Science Department is, "Nyah...nyah.nyah.nyah..nyah!"