Formally introducing myself in a mini-autobiography

I have begun to feel the need to introduce myself.

I’ve been on this site for four years, mostly coasting, but in the past few months I feel like I’ve crossed a sort of threshold. My follower count has increased, nothing phenomenal, but I feel like I am becoming at least recognizable instead of just a wallflower. What’s more than that, other than the increase, I feel like my dedication to this platform is setting in. That’s a big deal, I’ve been on a lot of platforms over the years, but this one seems to matter now.  I have full intent to not only post plenty of original content but to increase that to quality made videos and even some man on the street stuff.  I need to buy cameras.

Since I’m introducing myself, I’m going to give some background. A mini auto-biography. If you down-vote and say ;tldr I’m just going to assume you’re a clown. Feel free to move along, this is the authors introduction, not the book.

I grew up in a desert town out in the middle of nowhere West Texas called Pecos – that’s where I get my user name from. Back in 1996 when I first started setting up online accounts I tried to come up with a good username for myself. All the simple “codename” type names were already taken. To put it in perspective a simple code-name without numbers was still obtainable in this time period. I figured if Pecos Bill could do it, so could I, so I went with pecosdave and for a significant amount of time I was the only one. Then a couple of Internet gamblers came along, and then a porn-king, also a guy from Pecos New Mexico, but he’s not a big one. I’m none of those guys. If I was an online porn king I would choose a different moniker than the one my grandma knows, at least for those activities. If you find a pecosdave on a website it’s probably me, except for some reason on Sony sites, Tumblr and Twitch I think it was, they beat me to it there.

So, in that desert town I grew up as a minority. Yes, whites can be minorities, even in the United States. It was a not quite a border town, it was on the human and drug trafficking routes so close enough. I have a learning disability – and a pretty much on the line genius level IQ. Nice mix right? I can’t memorize and regurgitate. I have an incredible memory for concepts and experiences, but I can barely remember my own zip code, in fact I still have to look at my license when I need that half the time.  (this fact was well known about me and was exploited in court)  This made growing up difficult since schools were all about memorize it long enough to pass a test then forget. I aced national and state level tests though, the kind where you had to think, not memorize. My parents thought my grades were the most important thing on earth so I was pretty much grounded from about the third grade until the 10th grade. While I was growing up I started riding my BMX everywhere and loved it (when I wasn’t too grounded). Even after I bought a car I kept biking, and was known for it in town – this is important later on, but not so much at this stage. I heard myself referred to as “the boy who rides his bike to church” from some of the elderly folks talking in the hall.

I moved to Phoenix for a year and half after high school. I attended a tech school there and had a variety of jobs.  That particular school no longer exist, it was a victim of Obama's war on "for profit colleges".  I so remember when "for profit" was a dirty word in his era. I started out as a security guard for a while, then I got some manufacturing jobs, the first of which was building fully legal and authorized Mac Clones. I lost that job because Steve Jobs got his back. I went on to build – get this – computerized seat-back tray tables for airlines with touch-screens and credit card readers. Then I did the cool stuff, I started building sorting systems for the U.S. Postal service (under sub-contract) and got to go install them.

Phoenix wasn’t the best place to start an I.T. career while I was there. Lots of manufacturing jobs, lots of high end jobs, not a lot to climb the ladder on for an upstart and loads of competition from peers that weren’t necessarily “on the spectrum” and still overcoming hick-town mindset issues that don’t work in a city. I actually addressed those purposely and knew I would before I got out on my own, but it took years to really address. Also my family was upset I lived so far away by myself, so they found me a job in the Houston area.

So, in January of 1998 I moved to Houston. My parents were SO much happier that I was back in Texas. I looked it up on Mapquest back in the day, tuns out I was about 30 miles closer to my parents in Houston than I was in Phoenix. But they moved to the Baton Rouge area in 2000 so they were actually half the distance after that, but further from my sister than I ever was from them….
 

I worked for a small computer firm supporting Novell networks. Great people there. Rather uneventful on the whole most of the year I was there, until we started an ISP with one of our clients. This is what got me to stick around at first, I wasn’t planning to stay in Houston super long but helping an upstart company with promises of dollar signs was a good reason to stick around, and the company was very successful, but forgot early promises.

So I moved on to supporting the oilfield. Got married and kid with a sociopath and put myself into financial ruins for not quite 20 years over it, also my career advancement came to a screaching halt all at once after a lot of early promise. Love my daughter, fought for her legally most of the time she’s been alive, did okay at first, failed miserably towards the end. The legal system is rigged against fathers and is designed to make sure they can never afford legal representation once child support begins to keep fairness and justice at bay. My daughter is 18 now and about to graduate, I wish her the best and I’m here for her for life, it never required legal coercion.

While at the ISP and well into the petroleum field job I became a sort of early, very minor, Internet celebrity. In that I was recognized on the street occasionally, not that I had a huge fan-fair. Moderating the IRC server we had at the ISP made me someone of note locally and I met more than one person who knew who I was after they found out where I worked. Then, I was a very active user on Userfriendly.org when that was a big deal. In effect it almost counted as an early social network and I could just about drive what the discussions were on the site, especially on Saturdays when I stayed active on it. Turns out the folks from there will stick with you for life even after moving on.

After the oil field I drifted a bit, various short term contracts mostly in energy, from petroleum to electric and a bit more. (always I.T. related) It was basically a little over two years of hell not being able to find a solid job in the Bush W. era.

Then I landed at NASA. I probably stayed there longer than I should have, two or three years would have been about right to recover my career and make it look good on my resume, I stayed for nearly eight. The court shrink said I was unstable for having changed jobs so often, never-mind I was in my mid 20’s when she condemned me and the I.T. field is one you have to move on to move up. That politicians daughter got put through college on her daddies dime (or political favors) and had clients ordered to her by a court there after. Woman had no comprehension of what it was like to have to really work for a living, but by God I’m unreliable for moving on and moving up.

That being said, I enjoyed my time there. I consider it an honor to have worked with legendary figures from the space program and even with my less legendary peers. That job had to finally come to an end when Obama started his red state punishment program and started cutting as much as he could without getting all the torches lit and pitchforks sharpened. A skeleton crew space center was politically safe, not even the fake news media could protect him from the backlash of a closed space center. I did survive a lot of layoffs, but like I said, staying there was for child and court purposes. Besides, a libertarian (both upper and lower case at the time) working for the government on one of these types of programs is a little like a vegan working at a steak house.

During that time, I started talking to a woman from back home. Not a high school sweetheart or anything, there were too many years between us for that, but the daughter and sister of friends. That’s right, party foul, I was friends with her brother and dad. We both had dealt with sociopaths and our similar experiences sort of drew us together. It went something like this:

1. Get engaged.
2. Get layoff notice.

3. Get married.

4. Get lay off.

Fortunately that unemployment span didn’t last 48 hours and I went to work with my best friend as a boss (met him during the oil-company support days).

So, back around to the bike thing. I worked sixteen hours a day at the Internet service, then just became a complete and total fat-ass during the oil company days and was still one at NASA. While at NASA after Hurricane Ike put 4 ½ feet of water into my rent house I moved to a new apartment complex with a great gym. I started hitting the elliptical daily and lost a massive amount of weight. Then the daughter battle heated up again, I couldn’t afford my own place, moved in with a buddy and slowly became a fat-ass again. I had JUST bought a new bike with the intent of shaping up before Ike hit – it floated around that rent house by the tires.

After that settled and I got my own place again, I committed to biking to work every day. My reputation as a bike guy was reborn close to fifteen years after I last wore the title. I got into the best shape I was ever in in my life. The day I got married to my wonderful wife is within a week or two of my best health ever.

During that time I developed an excellent diet on my own. I did it by eating what felt right and paying attention to my body (also what fit into the ultra-tight court induced poverty budget). It was a mostly low carb, lean meat and vegetables diet with some flexibility. I didn’t intentionally go low-carb and it didn’t properly fit the low carb definition, but it mostly worked out that way minus some tortillas and breaded chicken in my stir fry sometimes. Getting married ruined that, the wife got bored with the healthy diet fast and she was a carb junky at the time. Fresh off of being vegetarian, but she was a bad vegetarian, I like to think I influenced her to eating more veggies and a little healthy meat.

I became a bit of a fat-ass again at the next place since I couldn’t bike to work anymore, and I’m fighting that now. It’s not so easy now that biking to work daily isn’t really an option. I work at a place with a shower, but it’s in the core of Houston and there’s no way I’m going to live in the core of this metro hell-hole. It’s hard enough in the suburban part I’m in now. South of the city like when I was at NASA and was in the coastal/island slow-down and more easy going area fine, but not the mover-shaker libtarded urban jungle.

My wife and I have two of the cutest, smartest little boys you would ever want to see.

The older one is six years old, mostly reading and excelling at his studies. He’s kindergarten aged and my wife has home-schooled him. What we have going for us is her mother was a kindergarten teacher, in fact she was my kindergarten teacher. To top it off I am quite a few years older than my wife, I joke with her that I knew her mom before she did. Back on topic, she tests the boys to check their progress. She says it’s a privilege to work with a GT kid one on one while testing my boys, because in public school you let the gifted ones alone and gave your time to the ones needing the most help. My mother in law, in addition to having been a kindergarten teach was honored on the state capital lawn due to her outstanding results, so I think we’ve got an advantageous advantage where home-schooling is concerned, she helps to make our curriculum. In addition to being good with his lessons our older one did a best first no-training-wheels ride on a bike I’ve ever seen and was pretty much solid within a week or two of having the training wheels taken off. He loves to bike, but I have to put him on a trail-behind when we go out on the seawall or someplace public. He has zero situational awareness and just swerves without looking, but we’ll get there. He also loves video games, and I guess he’s good at them for six, I find it hard to watch him sometimes, but on Bloons TD 6 he actually does a reasonable job and does alright with Lego Batman and Costume Quest. Much to his mothers chagrin he LOVES Goat Simulator.

The younger guy, he’s two. He is incredibly strong-willed, intelligent, and not fearless, but not worried about repercussions. He likes to participate in his brothers school lessons and loves watching Super Why! As a result when my mother in law tested him he knew 24 of 26 letters at two and half. He already does simple addition and subtraction, and one of the biggest issues we had with him even as an infant is he only had to see something once to be able to do it himself. There’s no such thing and putting something out of reach or out of sight, he knows it’s there and he knows how to get it. I’ve actually installed key-locks on computers that lock out the operation of the power button without a key just keep him from turning them off to annoy his brother and I cut metal to secure and old iMac to a table. He was sort of born a TV junky, we really have to watch his screen time because despite being very active, he turns into a potato on occasion. He loves watching his brother play Lego Batman.  He's also got a very well developed sense of humor for his age and cracks jokes in his own way regularly.

My daughter loves art, Japanese things and is learning the language, and is graduating days from now. In fact I debated writing this as past tense for future simplicity, but nah. Custody was a sham, there was an associate judge that screwed the case up early on to impress the feminist judge he worked for. She realized how badly he screwed up, but didn’t want to own it politically so we were able to side-step his screw up by having my parents take my daughter for a while. She should have been with me, but I supported their intervention for her sake since politically I was tarnished after that associate judge screwed the pooch. That particular associate judge was later fired for doing exactly what he did to me, but to the son of a political donor to the judges campaign. Turns out if you annoy a judge enough and they get tired of seeing you, you sometimes get what you want, so that didn’t work for more than a few years, and I was neutered as far as being able to fight was concerned. Punitive child support I’ve determined is more to keep dads from being able to fight than it is to support a child. My daughter is smart and I think she’s going to do well in life, and I’m keeping a room available to her and I’ll be her dad for life. That never took a court order.

My wife is all about being a mama.  She's sold a lot of direct marketing stuff over the years, and though I found it annoying when she did it the normal way, I'm actually encouraging her to pick up two of the things she did actively in the past, but to do them casually.  She's recently quit her long term retail job and is focusing on they boys and myself, and I think she has a lot to share. As I focus on becoming a presence here, I want to help her to be one as well.  She's also stepped up taking care of me.  She's got me moving in the right direction diet wise again and it's really working out.

A note about increased presence.  I am friends with some real, genuine, recognizable Internet celebrities.  I'll call them niche and baseline, but it took relatives sharing links to them without my input to realize just how popular my friends were.  You would never guess which ones, and I'm not involved with that part of their life beyond doing some computer and network work for them, and I'm not bringing them in on this.  Just sort of trivia.

SO the Cliffs Notes version:

Grew up in an oil/cow town set on a path to be a cowboy/oilfield type, but rejected that.

Learning disability but still genius I.Q. type making me very effective at a lot of things as long as I have my notes about the details I can’t memorize….

Former bottom-of-the-barrel almost internet celebrity from the early days of the web starting to sort of feel like he’s starting to get above nobody again introducing himself.

Former active upper case Libertarian now happy to associate more with lower case libertarian and fits in well with freedom / patriots types, though I’m not sure patriot in the traditional use is right for me.

Worked in a lot of areas and if you live in the United States my work has indirectly affected you in one way or another. Maybe even a little if you don’t live in the U.S.

Three smart kids with promising futures.

Loves dogs, severe cat allergy, and is a great bike mechanic and general doer of many things mechanical, electrical and data.

Can't believe I made it all the way without really saying I'm a Linux guy...

I'm moving North to East Texas in a year if all continues on the planned route.

If you made it to the bottom, I’m impressed.