who am i

Three things define me as a person:

1. My wife, friends, and family;
2. My 20+ years in the Navy; and
3. My generally geek-centric way of doing things.

For the first, my beloved bride has as much made me who I am as what I've been exposed to and done. I never regret for a moment marrying her 14+ years ago.

In the Navy, though I started life as a Hospital Corpsman (Operating Room Technician and FMF) deployed on boats and with Marines, I've spent the majority of my time in aviation as a RIO in F-14 Tomcats and a WSO in FA-18F Super Hornets.

As a geek, well, my degree and hobbies heavily revolve around computers and their engineering, both software and hardware. I've been using linux since 1993 (kernel v0.99pl13, IIRC) and consistently try to find new ways to automate various things using bash or python. Perhaps most of my (pre-aviation) academic efforts have until recently been focused in this realm. (This is very much the basis of my Navy callsign, "R2". I claim no valid comparison with the famous droid but it is a nomiker that has certainly stuck with me.)

Recently I'm challenging this auto-definition, partly voluntarily and partly voluntold-ily (i.e. orders). Specifically (and currently the focus of this blog), I'm learning Pashto (at Defense Language Institute) and I've started CrossFit (at Potomac CrossFit). Both are a fairly drastic divergence from my normal and historical behavior. We'll see how they stick!

This blog is as much for my own mental health and motivation as for inviting dialogue.