I'm 22 years old. I have lived in North Carolina my entire life; and in the triangle area for the majority of it (I was born in Haywood County which is over in the Appalachians).

I'm part Irish (three of my great-great grandfathers were Irish), part Danish and part Welsh.

Computers have been an interest of mine for as long as I can remember. I started programming when I was 8 in Turbo Pascal.

This is my 15th (!) year on the internet. Sometimes I get nostalgic about the old days. Back in 1994, we didn't have Google or Facebook or Twitter or Wikipedia or YouTube. The ability to display images on webpages was still considered to be a "hot feature" as it had been introduced only a couple years earlier. "Streaming video" consisted of a black and white 160x160 image that maybe updated a few times a second if you were lucky.

Politically, I am a libertarian. More specifically, I subscribe to the deontological libertarian school of thought. I tend to be economically conservative and socially liberal. Governments in any form are an inherent, albeit necessary evil and their function should be limited to the basics needed to protect the rights of the people and to enforce contracts.

I despise both the Republican and Democrat parties and refuse to vote for candidates of either party. (With the exception of Ron Paul but he really should switch to the Libertarian Party since he has more in common with them) Both are equally corrupt. This country has become a two-party dictatorship; both parties filled with corrupt politicians who serve no one's interests but their own.

Every few years or so, the controlling party starts to loose public favor and everyone screams that they are corrupt and votes them out in favor of the other party. And then they get corrupt with power and then people vote the other party in.

Last year, it was the Republicans that everyone was screaming were corrupt and the democrats that were hailed as saviors. In a few years, it'll be reversed, again and people will be screaming about the corrupt democrats. This biarchy must end.

Some other things :

I am an avid video gamer. I've been playing PC games since the DOS days.

I also play the piano and like to think that I'm somewhat good at it. I've been playing it for 12 years and I'm completely self-taught. I have no actual formal piano or musical training. I'm also pretty good at programming synthesizers and creating new sounds.

Linguistics is also one of my interests. I find it fascinating to observe variations in how people communicate and use language and to figure out the origins of different words. I am proficient in Latin (though not fluent; I'm better at reading/writing Latin than speaking it).

Some people ask why I chose to learn Latin. After all, no one speaks it as their first language anymore. I find Latin to be a beautiful language. It's elegant and it's remarkably succinct and to the point. In Latin, you say exactly what you mean; there aren't a million different ways to phrase something or beat around the bush like there are in English.