So, I guess this is to be my first blog post. I suppose I should tell a little bit more about myself than I put in the 'About Me' section of my profile.

The short version: I was born, I went to school, and now I go to work.

I'll skip the details of my childhood, except to say that I was raised Roman catholic. I tried to believe, but it didn't take. Then I had lots of arguments about going to church with my parents.

I've always been interested in math and science. I may be a little odd in that I enjoy solving interesting math and physics problems for fun (things like this, though I haven't actually solved that problem, I think it may require some fourier analysis...). I'm also probably the biggest computer geek I know, and I work at a software company. I'm a big fan of Linux and the whole open source thing.

I went to school at the University of Illinois where I majored in Mathematics and minored in Physics with the intention of going to grad school right out of undergrad. I ended up getting burnt out on school: taking 14+ hours of 4-500 level math and physics every semester and working 3 jobs may tend to have that effect on people...So, now I'm working at a software company doing just about everything with computers except writing code (and I've even done some of that) and getting some work experience and money. I tend to spend most of my days doing installations, testing, and customer support which means playing with SQL databases and some legacy environments. I plan on going back to grad school one of these days.

In my spare time I like to ride my bicycle (actually, mine is silver and is last year's model), and I've been interested in getting into road racing with it. I also like to read whenever I can find the time. I also almost always have at least one coding project going on; right now I'm working on a barcode inventory tracking application. I told you I'm the biggest computer geek I know.

I've called myself an atheist for somewhere between 2 and 3 years now, but I've been an atheist longer. I just didn't recognize the transition from an agnostic/deist position to an atheist position. Most of my reasons for being and staying an atheist are ones based upon observation and reason. I didn't ever have any traumatic experience with religion or where god wasn't there. I just asked questions and when I didn't get answers, I looked for them myself. At some point I realized that no religion had the answers to my questions and that the worldview presented by science had better answers (and better questions). The scientific method is awesome.

I did it, my first post. Hopefully, the ones in the future will be more interesting than this one, as I won't feel compelled to introduce myself again. Also, I should have a profile pic soon. Stay tuned.