User:Curtis Autery

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Aspect
This user is married.
dad This user is a father.
This user enjoys cooking.
This user is a bibliophile.
This user contributes using Linux.
re-4 This user is an expert regular expression programmer.
This user owns one or more dogs.
B
This user is a blogger at Medicine For The Sky
KW This user is the Kwisatz Haderach.
666 This user has 6 letters in each of his three names.
This user contributes using his real name.

I am a 37 year old father to two beautiful girls, and husband to one beautiful woman. Everything else is secondary.

Contents

[edit] Profession

I am a computer programmer, currently working for American Electric Power, where I've been employed since 2003. For the 6 years prior to that, I was employed in the electronic commerce company Sterling Commerce, officially as a telecommunications troubleshooter and script writer, and unofficially as a Unix System administrator and maintainer of some custom [[Job Control Language|JCL].


[edit] Hobbies


[edit] Volunteering

All my volunteer work involves kids, most involves working with them in a school setting.

I first started volunteering in 2002 at a local elementary school. The organization Tech Corps Ohio placed me with a school where I taught three 5th grade classes basic computer skills and how to create PowerPoint slideshows, and Excel spreadsheets. I taught the same class for a second year, and then stopped volunteering with Tech Corps.

In 2003, I responded to a request in my daughter's school to teach a four-day spreadsheet class to 4th and 5th graders. This class was part of a stock market project for the school, where each grade level picks a company to follow.

I have also helped my daughter's Brownie troop with a pair of technology related badges.

Lastly, I am currently volunteering with a local counseling group as a mentor to a teenaged boy. This last gig is the one that I value the highest. My mentee and I have been matched for over 4 years, and I watched him grow from a sullen pathological liar with an anger problem into a respectable young man. My work with the counseling service and with my mentee has earned me a "Commended Mentor" award from the Mentoring Center of Central Ohio

[edit] Science fiction

I started becoming interested in Science fiction later in life than most geeks do. I never enjoyed reading until my early 20s, and hence didn't have a taste for young-adult space opera fiction. Instead, I was drawn towards writing with substance. Here are some sci-fi books that I've enjoyed, some not traditionally classified as sci-fi:

[edit] Indie movies

Here are some fine examples of independent(ish) films, some more gruesome than others:

[edit] Fitness

In school I was healthy, riding bikes and playing sports. After school, I worked hard in a restaurant and had healthy pursuits outside of work, like camping and volleyball. Then I got a desk job, and slowly lost track of my friends, and slowly stopped playing and working hard. Years later, I couldn't jog across a parking lot without getting winded, and my weight slowly crept up to a startling 255 pounds. So I decided to live healthy again.

A year later, I lost 80 pounds, joined a rec league soccer team, and married a hippy who knows a lot about healthy food.

[edit] Truisms

  • Retreat from victory
This is a phrase used mainly as political rhetoric, but my use of it is not. To retreat from victory is to be wary of easy wins, and to avoid the desire to see your opponent detroyed. If you seem close to achieving victory, either it's a trap, or you are acting like an animal.
  • Slow down
Don't rush through life seeking novelty, sensation, and today's trends. Find the things you enjoy, follow your bliss, as Joseph Campbell would say. Read a book, bake some bread from scratch, sit down with your kid and talk to her. Exciting has its place, but fulfillment trumps it. You can't stay the height of cool forever: Coolness, like beauty, is an uphill battle that will always wear you down in the long run. Find something you're happy with, not something that makes you look good.
Simple as that. Watch after your family. Help the old lady cross the street. Give when you can. Don't hurt anyone. Leave an issue unresolved if force is necessary to resolve it.
  • Learn how to do math
The modern world will take shameless advantage of you if you can't crunch the numbers. A $10,000 credit balance at 10% APR will cost you about $80 a month to carry. $80 a month is about 45ยข per hour off of your pay. 15 miles to work at 55 MPH will take you 16 minutes and 22 seconds. 15 miles to work at 80 MPH will take you 11 minutes and 15 seconds. You can't get much work done in 5 minutes and 7 seconds. You can get pulled over and charged a hefty fine. 90 days is not the same as cash if you don't pay it all on time, it is a ridiculous interest rate retroactive to the date of the contract signing. And so on. Crunch the numbers, and don't be taken for a sucker.
  • Play with your kids
They're a lot more interesting than you might think. Leading by stoic example is a lost cause to a kid. Interacting with them gets the job done.
  • Get off your lazy butt
See Diseases of affluence for examples of where I was headed.

[edit] External links

Blog

This is a Wikipedia user page.

This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user to whom this page belongs may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Curtis_Autery.