Though while in college I focused on liberal-arts courses (political science, journalism, English, creative writing), I have always been something of a boot-strap engineer: I built a telephone system for myself and three neighbor boys back in the late 1960s (they climbed the poles and strung the wire; I devised the rest). I spent a lot of time in the garage, tinkering with electronics.

Flash-forward to the late 2000s and I’m again tinkering: this time with microprocessors, LEDs, circuit boards and programming. In between, I did learn to program in a variety of now-dead computer languages and was once a wiz at HyperTalk. But that didn’t really prepare me for the C programming necessary in microprocessors (though my more than passing acquaintance with PHP did).

Anyway, short of it all: middle-aged white guy with serious jones for fiddling with LEDs.

Also, here are the gory server details: This blog is running on Mac OS X 10.6.5, Apache 2.2.14/Darwin, PHP 5.3.2 and MySQL 5.0.86. It is platformed on an Apple Mac mini Core Duo 2.0, with 2 gigabytes of RAM and a 500-gigabyte hard drive.

This is WordPress 3.0.4 with the theme Spicy Typography 1.1 by Stefan Vervoort of DivitoDesign, which I heavily customized.