I was born and raised in
Youngstown,
Ohio.
Everybody has either flown over or driven past the city, but few people have
actually been there. It's on the eastern edge of Ohio, about an hour away
from both Cleveland and
Pittsburgh. For more information,
you can check out
a history of Youngstown. I will just point out that despite seemingly
popular belief, the
Baseball Hall of Fame
is in Cooperstown, New York, not Youngstown, and the
Football Hall of Fame
is in Canton, Ohio, not Youngstown.
Growing up in Youngstown in the 70s and 80s isn't as boring as you might think. We used to cheer like madmen for the Pittsburgh Steelers, four-time Super Bowl champions, as well as Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini and Harry Arroyo, former WBA and IBF lightweight boxing champions. I went to the Austintown Local Schools, where I played trumpet for a few years, learned some Spanish, unsuccessfully tried to run cross-country, and never had any milk money stolen. I also used to read a lot of novels, ranging from mysteries to science fiction and fantasy.
After high school I decided to go out and see the world, or at least the
East Coast. I stayed in Boston
for five years, amidst all the museums, shows, sports, restaurants, history,
people and ice cream stores. It's a great, great place to live. You can (and
I did) ski in Vermont, swim and waterski on Cape Cod, bike on Martha's
Vineyard, dine on the 40th floor of the Prudential Center, read for hours in
Wordsworth, watch jugglers on tightropes in Quincy Market, ride swan boats
and make way for ducklings, attend the Boston Pops Fourth of July concert
and fireworks with 250,000 other people, or just sit by the Charles River
and watch the Head of the Charles crew races every fall.
After getting an A.B. (that's right) in Computer Science, I spent a year working at MITRE, an independent consultant to various government organizations. MITRE is where I learned all about Unix, and where nice people fed me doughnuts every Friday morning.
Now I'm back in school at the
University of Illinois in
Urbana-Champaign. We're south of
Chicago, west of
Indianapolis, and northeast of
St. Louis.
Although Urbana isn't quite the same as Boston, we have a very nice campus,
there's a lively group of 35,000 students in town, and the three major
nearby cities are only 2-3 hours away by car. I'm studying computer science
again, and hope to graduate sometime before I'm eligible for Medicare (which
is probably sooner than many people think).