Comments:
I didn't actually graduate from CSHS - I left my senior year to start college at an interesting school called "Clarkson". It was my attempt to redeem myself from 3 years of semi-slacking around so that I could get into a good college. CSHS said I was short some classes to get a diploma with this arrangement, so I instead got a G.E.D. from the state of NY.
The ironic thing is that after going through all that and getting into a couple of Ivy League schools I still ended up at U of I.
After U of I, I ended up in Ohio for 5 years working at a research place called Battelle. Then I decided to switch back to software and found myself in Chicago (Oakbrook) for a couple of years.
I had always wanted to live in CA, but had this distorted view of it - that there were continual earthquakes, mudslides and that it would be illegal to eat meat. I finally took the plunge in 1999 and moved out at the peak of the dot com boom. I really do love the Bay Area; I think it feels more like home than IL did, though the cost of things can be outrageous. I bounced around a couple of startups until I got lucky when Intel bought one of them out. I stuck around Intel for 5 years, and then started my own startup with my U of I classmate and friend John Yates. Shameless plug: come to boxaroo.com and try it!
But the most important thing that has happened connects back to a conversation in the cafeteria at CSHS. Someone was telling me that a certain (notably stellar) classmate of ours - whom I won't mention because I've never got confirmation of this - had 'found Jesus' and become a born-again Christian. And while I was certainly not an atheist, I felt this was just as weird and 'out there' as the people relaying this to me. Yet I found myself also becoming born again 10 years later after going to a Bible-based church and then a group called BSF (www.bsfinternational.org). Even if I hadn't met and married the most wonderful woman alive at BSF it still has been the best thing I've ever done.
