...your host

Ahhh, the life story. Definitely not required reading. I'll try to keep it short but hey, that isn't likely to happen considering how I can never shut up. :)

      Offspring of Karen Judith Gibbs and John Robert Gibbs. Born just outside of Chicago on August 11th 1974. Shortly after I was born, we moved to McHenry, Illinois which is about fifty miles from Chicago. My sister, Jennifer is born January 15th, 1977. My father develops lung cancer in nineteen seventy-nine and is given six months to live. He fights another three years and dies on Thanksgiving Day, nineteen eighty-two. His father dies only six days later from heart failure while undergoing surgery. My mother is strong and clever, she begins life as a widow and single mother. In an effort to perhaps give me a head start, my mother purchases a Commodore 64 computer to which I immediately lose myself in. I find the modem (50 Baud!) especially interesting and also delve into some basic programming, mostly copying code from magazines available at the time which listed little block based games. I also run up mom's phone bill connecting to at the time, text based BBS's and later, ANSI base. I go through school with most of the normal issues and memories of anyone else. My father's death plays a role in some schooling issues, mostly having to do with attention span. Later in life I'll learn that many people in my profession have similar attention span issues and actually use them to an advantage. (Multi-Tasking anyone?) After my seventh grade year, we move to Roswell, New Mexico to be near family. My mother's parents live in Roswell and her brother and family live in Dallas, Texas. My father's mother lives in Houston with my father's sister and her family. While in Roswell I begin eighth grade and continue on into high school.

...the site

For the technical, or just the plain bored. I offer you a bit of technical insight into this masterpiece of bored proportions. (Or something witty like that).

The look and feel of the site is fairly simple. The layout is almost all based in tables. The font used in the menu graphics is called "Silkscreen". The accent picture(s) are of driftwood and they are not credited to me. (odd for a photographer, I know). The functionality of the site is mostly my own creation, the exception is the Gallery. Why re-invent the wheel? The gallery is a project which has been around a long time and continues to get better. My only claim to it is a few bug fixes early on. The blog is driven by PHP/MySQL and is edited from an admin page I wrote. The "You Speak!" feature is also my own and was inspired by similiar things that are out there. I wanted something custom which melded into the site nicely, so, I wrote my own. The rest of the site is mostly static HTML which keeps it simple. THe contact form is PHP using PHP's in-house mailer agent. It works well enough.

      High school in Roswell is benign. Fifty Fifty, boring. Aside from my close friends, nothing spectacular happens. I learn to drive in Roswell, a 1977 Dodge Colt. Burnt Orange. A classic indeed. I attend church more regularly in Roswell. The small, LCMS Lutheran church has several kids my age and I always have a good time with them. I attend my first National Youth Gathering here. This is an event which is very difficult to describe. It is an event that I will later chaperone. (You can see pictures in the gallery).
      Not quite three years later we are destined to move again. My mom's parents decide they want to be closer to my mom's brother, and better health care, in Dallas. This is much to the chagrin of my mother who has just moved to Roswell, on limited funds, with two kids, for the sole purpose of being near her family. My mother puts our new house up for sale. It sells and we move to Dallas, or, Garland to be exact.
      I begin attending high school at South Garland and meet many new people. At age seventeen I am hit by a car while pushing an out of gas truck. I'm lucky to live. I'm luckier to have minimal knee damage after the impact and being thrown over thirty feet. The accident is pivotal. Most of the 'friends' I had been hanging out with, who I'd been staying out late with, getting in trouble with, vanished. I recover and obtain a Volkswagen bug. I join a VW club and meet a different set of friends, people more in tune with reality. I meet my best friend to this day, John Rooney. Through John I meet many people who I still call friends today.
      After school I did mostly jobs in the car audio business. My first, at Circuit City, took me into my first residence away from mom's house. I moved to Longview, Texas, one hundred twenty miles east of Dallas. This is a fond time in my memory. I was twenty, on my own, in my own place (a glorified show box) broke and had a ton of new friends. I worked as a lead in the Road Shop. I enjoyed it immensely. I dated and partied like it was going out of style. Circuit City ended and I took a job with Bestbuy in Tyler. I made the drive for awhile, eventually moving to Tyler. Bestbuy didn't last a year. I met a girl who lived in Colorado and was attending CSU. She had come to Tyler just before I left BestBuy and we had hit it off after five days and countless hours on the phone. In our infinite wisdom, we decided that we would move in together, in Dallas. We did. It lasted no more then three months. I moved in with a friend, leaving our apartment to her and her sister who had moved down. My friend convinced me to try out the IT industry, since I spent all my free time on computers anyway, I thought why not.
      This turned out to be a large pivotal point as anyone who knows me these days, knows. I began in the IT industry doing what many do, the dreaded tech support. I dated and went to clubs. I eased out of tech support and into UNIX Systems Administration. I had spent much of my time using BSDI, Linux and Free-BSD. My roles took me from tech support into a more hands on support and eventually into systems administration, minor development and Application administration. When I was about twenty three, I met Sabrina Smith at one of the dance clubs I attended. We dated and moved in together. She would later become my wife and you can read that story under the "Diversions" area of this site. All my grand parents passed away between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-five or so. Sabrina and I moved from apartment to apartment, enjoying different areas. I went to work for Lucent in two-thousand one, Sabrina and I married on October 11th, 2003. The day after my father's birthday and just over a year after I was laid off from Lucent during the tech bubble burst. I began working for XO Communications in November of two thousand three, which made for a nice wedding gift. In February of two-thousand four, Sabrina and I bought a house in Plano, Texas and became suburbanites. Previously, we had mostly lived near downtown Dallas, not far from the place we met. I continue to work for XO and am quite happy. It is a job but in my eyes, it is also a school where I learn new things on a daily basis.

      I'll end by saying simply that I am a product of my upbringing. My mother instilled in me the things I needed to survive in this world. Had my father lived, I would be someone different, I would live somewhere different, I would know different things. It is amazing how events shape us, but, they do shape us. I am happy where I am.