Personal Information

What I look like

Hi there! The above picture is of me and my wife Jeannine. We were married July 18, 1992, the Year Without a Summer (in Southern Ontario, at least). We first started dating on June 14, 1986. Our lives have never been the same since... We have 4 sons, Joshua (see the photo album), born August 22, 1997, Ian, born June 25, 2000, Curtis, born November 23, 2001, and Dylan, born May 13, 2003.
In case anyone is wondering (or cares), I'm 6'1" tall, weigh about 180 lbs, my eyes are hazel (not quite blue or brown), and I wear glasses for nearsightedness. My birthday was September 5, 1966, making me a Virgo by the newspaper definition, but a Leo according to my astronomy program. Yes, the horoscopes are about a month inaccurate!

Personal history

I worked for nearly a year at the Atmospheric Environment Service, helping to modify an upper atmosphere ozone layer chemistry model, and then writing an internal survey paper on non-CO2 greenhouse gases.The government cuts finally caught up to me and I could find no more work there.  I landed a research assistant job at Dalhousie University's Department of Oceanography, where I did some support work for the meteorology group. It was there that we bought 2 kittens, Stormy and Sylvester, and it was Stormy who became the inspiration for the now well-known Bad Kitty List in September, 1993. The response to my first post to rec.pets.cats was overwhelming, and I collected all the responses and kept reposting. The Bad Dog List came into being a couple of months later as an offshoot of Bad Kitty, and the Cat Rules were based upon a posting which turned out to be a copy of Basic Rules for Cats who Have a House to Run, which I much later found to have been written by a Cynthia Whitney.

We returned to Toronto in May of 1994, having realized that our future did not lie in Nova Scotia. The support of my mother's family there made our stay much better than it would otherwise have been, and we wish circumstances (money, time) would allow us to go back soon! I had a job modifying a 2-D climate model for Dr. Danny Harvey in the Geography Department of the University of Toronto for the summer, but leaped at an opportunity to teach the Geography Statistics course in the Fall. It was a lot of hard work, but I enjoyed it and learned almost as much as the students did. The next three months were spent doing research into the Modifiable Area Unit problem for my boss, Carl Amrhein, the Chair of the Geography Department. I also looked for work, but had no luck, and the research was going so well that I was convinced to make an "honest man" of myself and to get into the PhD program, which I did. I have passed my thesis proposal defense, so now all I have to do is get the research done and write the dissertation. Easier said than done, especially with all the distractions around...

In June of 1998 I was awarded my Ph.D. after my successful thesis defence at the end of January. Follow this link to read my thesis. On May 28, 1998 I began work with a small company called Generation 5 Data Modeling and Statistical Analysis Inc as their GIS/mapping "manager" (I get to manage myself!). Our primary purpose is to aid target marketing with our postal code level datasets and segmentation systems. Among the other skills I've picked up while there are MapBasic programming and MS-Excel macros. We're not so small anymore, and are growing rapidly still.

As I've always been a computer person, it seemed natural to focus on the Geographical Information Systems concentration. I had to teach myself how to use the MapInfo program so I could turn around and explain it to a planning class, and I've since used my increasing knowledge of GIS principles and practice to give a number of successful seminars introducing GIS and MapInfo to students and alumni of the department, and Geography teacher candidates from the Faculty of Education. If you wish, you can see an HTML-ized copy of my handout.

I was able to set up a Web site at the Geography deparment (since moved to Geocities) here in September 1994 for my lists, since we didn't have a proper news reader/poster here at the time. As time progressed, I added more and more material to the site, focusing on clean humour and pets. This July (of 1996) the Bad Kitty list got its 100,000th recorded hit. A list of awards (all old now) that my site has acquired, plus a list of countries I have been read in and a hit count list can also be viewed.

Interests

Meteorology

Geographical Information Systems

Magazines

Books and Games

Television

• The New Red Green Show
• Star Trek (all of them...)
• The X-Files
• Babylon 5 (Yes, I'm into science fiction...)
• The Simpsons
• Married with Children (yes, I admit to watching it! It's loud, crude, rude, nasty, and has no redeeming qualities. But I like it...)
• Here are the Unofficial and Official ReBoot home pages. For the moment I'm stuck watching re-runs on YTV here in Toronto, but maybe the next season will start soon...
• Do you hate Barney the Dinosaur? If so, click here! If you'd like the chance to interactively "kill" the purple monster, here is the place to go! A very necessary public service!
• The Muppet Show and other related Muppet stuff. The premature death of Jim Henson was a tremendous tragedy, in my humble opinion.
• Other shows I've started watching recently include That Seventies Show, Malcolm in the Middle, and Titus.

Cartoons

Comics links are here.