Hello...
I'm one of that rare breed who actually posts under my real name.
I was born in January of 1966... so I'm just SLIGHTLY older than televised Star Trek. In fact, some of my earliest fuzzy memories involve evenings at home, and I remember my parents thinking it was funny that an under-one-year-old was so into that "space show."
When I was five, we moved... at the beginning of the summer. And so for several months, I was friendless. So, Gilligan, Colonel Hogan, Batman, and the Crew of the Enterprise filled that gap for a while.
I never quite got past that, either.
When I was a kid, I was kind of shy and passive. Yes, believe it or not, PASSIVE. I learned through experience that this is really only a way to get walked on, so my personality is nearly opposite of that at this point. I'm probably one of the more... ahem... "expressive"... folks you're going to see on here. I say exactly what I mean.
I paid for my college education by doing a four and a half year tour on active military service... and got to dig people out in San Francisco, take out a central American drug-lord/dictator, kick some bad guys out of a small Arab country, and do a bunch of other things as well. It was a BUSY few years. I'm a big fan of the idea of SOME form of compulsory national service, though I don't think it necessarily should be MILITARY for everyone. I'm politically conservative (which, despite what some folks will try to tell you, doesn't mean I barbeque babies for breakfast... it means that I'm not a fan of government having any more power than the absolute minimum it MUST have to accomplish those tasks which MUST be done...and no more), and I tend to get annoyed when people bring in nasty "baby-eating" accusations towards conservatives in non-politically-oriented threads.
I'm a senior level design engineer today, and have spent the past several years in aerospace, though I've worked in a variety of different industries throughout my career and I'm sure that I'll work in more later. I'm currently in the running for a VP-level position, in fact, though we'll see if that goes anywhere.
And even my FUN tasks tend to be somewhat serious... designing a starship becomes a major engineering task unto itself!
