1963

Born in Pictou, Nova Scotia

Moved to Chatham, New Brunswick

1964

My first sister, Nicole, born

1969

Moved to Ottawa, Ontario

Started school at Our Lady of Peace, a Catholic school in Bells Corners

1972

Second sister, Nadja, born

Moved to North Bay, Ontario

Started grade 4 at Pope John XXIII, another Catholic school

1974

Moved from the town to the base, CFB North Bay

Started grade 6 at Paul Davoud, a public school for military kids

1975

Moved to Edmonton, Alberta

Started grade 7 at Major-General Griesbach, another base school

1977?

Contributed to semi-official junior high paper (on 8 1/2 x 14 pages run through a Gestetner) run by Mike Vernon, along with Geoff Porter, Jim Derosiers, and Teresa Black (if I remember everyone's names correctly)

1978

Started grade 10 at Archbishop O'Leary, a Catholic high school

1979

Along with Anthony Fulmes, Mike McDonald, Scott Juskiw, Ed Dobek, and a cast of thousands, started work on The S.T., a student underground magazine that didn't actually publish until 1981... though not for lack of trying

1980

Introduced Joey Did and the Necrophiliacs (Mike McDonald, Scott Juskiw, Ed Dobek, Dennis Lenarduzzi) to the world -- well, O'Leary High School -- by yelling, "Ladies and gentlemen, Joey Did and the Necrophiliacs! 1, 2, 3, 4!"

Appeared as part of O'Leary HS team on CBC TV quiz show Reach for the Top, along with Anthony Fulmes, Ian McGillis, and Gwen Stewart. We didn't make it to the provincial finals

Moved to Summerside, Prince Edward Island

Started grade 12 at Three Oaks Senior High, a public school

1981

Appeared as part of Three Oaks Senior High team on Reach for the Top in Charlottetown. Did a bit better than I did in Edmonton

Started first year at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, eventually deciding to major in English

1982

Parents moved to Chatham, New Brunswick (again)

1984

Finished B.A. (English), started Masters in Library Science (also at Dal)

Steve Gamblin and I wrote a satirical depiction of life in Howe Hall, the university's male residence, for the Dalhousie Gazette, under the pseudonym R.P. McMurphy. The dean of the residence was reportedly not entirely amused

1985

Parents moved to Ottawa (again)

Summer job in Calgary, Alberta. Saw Jr. Gone Wild for the first time at the Riviera Rock Room in Edmonton.

Back in Halifax, I co-wrote the Dear Rambo advice column for the Dal Dispatch with Chris MacKnight for a few months

1986

Finished M.L.S, moved to Ottawa, got 6-month term position at Indian and Northern Affairs

1988

Started 6-week term position at Telesat Canada; I'm still there, though I've had a promotion or two (I now manage the library I was hired to work six weeks in)

1991

CompuServe account (I'd been using business/professional online services like Dialog and InfoMart for years already)

1992

Well account

1993

Freenet account

1995

Home page

1999

Met Laura Thomas

2001

Married Laura Thomas (on September 11. It's a long story.)

Interests

Music. Jr. Gone Wild, the Mike McDonald Band, and Greyhound Tragedy are obviously big favorites; they make up the bulk of my web pages. Well, they used to. Mike has his own page now, and GT is working on theirs. Band pages tend to be more flashy than I can easily do in my spare time these days. From those groups alone you can figure out that I like country rock, punk, folk, roots rock, alternative, and so on. Other favorite bands and performers include Killing Joke, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Cocteau Twins, Brian Eno, Kate Bush, Curve, Buzzcocks, Labradford, and Dead Can Dance. I don't like prefab top 40 or "new country" or opera or show tunes, but I'm open to nearly anything else. My collection ranges from Petula Clark to Metallica, from Cab Calloway to Controlled Bleeding, from Husker Du to Hedningarna, from Patsy Cline to Ice T, from Curtis Mayfield to Philip Glass. Purchases in 2001 include stuff by David Sylvian, Harold Budd, James Brown, The Who, Nina Simone, Etta James, Rudimentary Peni, Ella Fitzgerald, ESP Summer, Lou Reed, Aimee Mann, Stars of the Lid, Can, the Ramones, Young Marble Giants, Ladytron, Matthew Shipp, Sun Ra, the Soft Boys, Gene, Whipping Boy, Pale Saints, Slowdive, Chris Bell, Violet Indiana, Paula Frazer, the 6ths, the Seeds, the Gentle Waves, Gram Parsons, Rothko, Terry Riley, MX80, the Music Machine, the Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, the Hudson Falcons, Muddy Waters, Leonard Cohen, John Zorn, Sigur Ros, House of Love, the Stooges, the Heptones, Nawal al Zoughbi, the Sonics, Jawbox, Samira Said, the Creation, the Hoodoo Gurus, Electronic, Bessie Smith, Andrea Parker, Tori Amos, the Real McKenzies, New Order, His Name Is Alive, Althea and Donna, Frank Sinatra, Neko Case, Fabulous Disaster, Maow, a bunch of the Ken Burns Jazz CDs... I don't play any instruments myself; whatever contribution I make to the world of music is indirect: spending too much money on albums, going to clubs to see bands, providing information on a few bands here on the web. (Best band I've seen live lately: the BellRays. Also fun live: the Corn Sisters, Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, the Real McKenzies.)

Books. Mystery, science fiction, nonfiction, humor... I read a lot of stuff. Favorite writers include Iain Banks, James Ellroy, Thorne Smith, Jack O'Connell, Philip K. Dick, and too many more to list. I've recently bought books by Carl Sagan, Oliver Sacks, Elliott Leyton, Evan Dorkin, Masamune Shirow, Jeanne Cavelos, Brian Eno, Greg Bear, Patricia Anthony, and Robert B. Parker. And, more recently, Helen Fielding, John King, Nick Hornby, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos. And I've been on a kick of nonfiction books about space, including neat finds like The Life and Death of a Satellite by Alfred Bester, author of the science fiction classics The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination. Oh, and I've been doing a Star Trek books website, the Complete Starfleet Library, for several years now. And I went temporarily insane and bought something like 160 Doctor Who books in less than six months. So far I've read 15 or 20 of them.

Movies. I'm especially fond of films noirs and old movies. My all-time favorites are Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, Double Indemnity, and Blade Runner (not a very old movie, but it some ways it captures the feel of the good ol' stuff). Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, the Marx Brothers, Bette Davis... I could go on for hours. I'm reasonably open-minded about new movies, too. Over the last year I've seen and enjoyed Crash, Hard Core Logo, and Trainspotting. I used to consider myself a fan of science fiction movies, but it's rare these days to find a real SF movie instead of a Stallone/Schwarzenegger action movie. Other favorites: more classic old movies like The Lady Eve, Gun Crazy, and the Thin Man series, a few Hong Kong action movies like Hard Boiled, and newer movies like Free Enterprise, High Fidelity and Bridget Jones' Diary.

TV. I confess, I'm an occasional couch potato. I'm a longtime Star Trek fan; I love the original series and DS9; I like The Next Generation; I'm still able to tolerate Voyager occasionally, and Enterprise seems a bit better than Voyager so far. My obligatory Trek web page content: the story of The God Thing, the novel by Trek creator Gene Roddenberry that has almost been published several times since 1977, but never quite made it to the printing presses. Of course, not long after this page was first created, that became part of the aforementioned books page. I'm also a fan of Babylon 5, Red Dwarf, Blake's 7, Doctor Who, The Prisoner, and The X-Files (well, I used to be). As far as nonSF goes, there's The West Wing, Law & Order, and the occasional Seinfeld rerun (as bad as the finale was, I still miss that show).

The Online World. I've been using online services for a long time, but for the first few years they were mainly work-related database systems. For example, in 1986, while I was still at Dalhousie, I was able to use the I.P. Sharp service to track newswire stories about the space shuttle explosion. I'd been using an internal email system to communicate with a couple friends at the university for a year or so by then.

As the reference librarian at Telesat, I've used quite a few specialized online services over the years. For example, I use Dun & Bradstreet to get financial information on companies; I use InfoMart and InfoGlobe (well, InfoGlobe doesn't really exist any more) mainly for news from Canadian publications, but also for their gateways to other online services; I use Dialog for the hundreds of databases it offers, from the Aerospace Database, with its abstracts of technical papers, to Eventline, with its information on conferences and trade shows, to PROMT, with its full text articles from a wide variety of magazines and industry publications. I use QuickLaw for Canadian law cases. Over the last few years, I've added the Internet to the mix of information sources.

It's been fascinating to watch the web develop, though it's not as exciting as it once was. It was fun seeing how many gopher servers were added every day to the main gopher directory on the Ottawa Freenet; now I only rarely connect to gopher sites, and then usually through a web browser. Strange though it may seem, I'm already nostalgic about the net, missing the way I used to get excited about learning basic unix commands to use my shell accounts, or about finding a copy of one of my uncle's books in a New Zealand library database through gopher... hell, I still remember the first time I transferred a file using ftp. All this online stuff is a big part of my life, at work and on my own time, but it's just a comfortable and accepted tool now.

Politics, Religion, Philosophy. Frankly, I'm not sure any of them are a good idea.

If I had to use a single word to describe my position it would be liberal, but there are a lot of positions often lumped in with liberalism that I don't agree with. I work out my political opinions on a case by case basis, not by checking what any ideologue tells me what to think. On some issues in Canadian politics I agree with the Liberal Party, but I also occasionally agree with Reform or the Progressive Conservatives. It's not unusual, however, for me to disagree with all of them. I'm generally in favour of a strong central government, because I've lived in several different provinces. A Canadian should have the same access to quality health care and education anywhere in the country, and that isn't the case. Giving the provinces more power will only increase the imbalances. On the Quebec issue, I would prefer that Quebec remain a province in Canada with the same powers as any other. If the Quebecois can't deal with that, Quebec should be partitioned to aid those who wish to remain part of Canada, and Quebec should be treated as a wholly separate country. No sovereignty-association. No Canadian citizenship. There's no middle zone between province and country. People of Quebec, make up your goddamn minds, do something about it, then shut the fuck up for a change.

As for religion, I was raised Catholic but eventually grew out of it. It was a gradual process; there was no one day when I decided to give it up. Instead, exposure to various ideas over the years led to me developing some critical thinking skills. For example, when I was about 9 years old, I started reading a lot of science fiction and moved on to fantasy and mythology as well. These all involve worlds very different from the world of the young Catholic boy, and showed possibilities I might not have considered otherwise.

When I was 11, I started reading stuff about UFOs, chariots of the gods, the Bermuda Triangle, and other "paranormal" phenomena. But too much of it tested the limits of my credulity a bit too much. For example, Erich von Daniken seemed to want to find (pseudo)scientific explanations for Biblical events that I, as a Catholic, accepted as being of symbolic, not literal, truth. Another writer, in a book about the Bermuda Triangle, added ghost stories and other supernatural events that I just couldn't buy, leading me to be a bit skeptical about the book as a whole. He didn't help his case by saying that the Bermuda Triangle (he called it the Devil's Triangle) was not unique, claiming that there were several places around the world where ships and aircraft seemed to disappear in unusual numbers. My reaction as a 12-year-old was to think that the whole point of Bermuda Triangle mania was that this area was unique. If there were many places where losses of aircraft and ships were common, then there was probably nothing unusual or unnatural about the Bermuda Triangle.

As for UFOs... there were a few things. From reading some science fiction by people who actually knew something about science, I knew that it's extremely unlikely that we would be visited by aliens, because the distances between stars are so tremendous. People want to believe. However, there are times you just can't believe. For example, I remember reading a book about people who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. One man told a story about the flying saucer that abducted him, the strange little aliens aboard it, their beautiful, human-looking, redhaired, voluptuous, nude female leader, who insisted on having lots of sex with him... it was obviously pure fantasy from beginning to end, and this was one of the book's strongest cases. Then there was the UFO magazine that printed a man's report of his own trip aboard a UFO. Describing how profoundly alien the ship was, how clearly not of this world, he made a point of commenting on the odd controls. He could tell this was alien, because by the controls were words like pqzx and ftrl, which are obviously not part of any human language. The guy was too stupid to realize that aliens wouldn't use our alphabet. So much for that, I thought. By the time I was 13 I'd lost pretty much all interest in all this sort of thing, but I kept on reading science fiction. At least science fiction writers make an effort to be believable.

So, I was learning to think critically. Eventually I started applying some of that to religion, around the time that I started being disgusted by religious fundamentalists like the Moral Majority (sorry, neither), and my faith finally gave up the (holy) ghost.

So much for politics and religion. My philosophy is simple, consisting of a few basic tenets. Don't do to others what you wouldn't want them to do to you, do to others what you'd like them to do to you, don't fuck around with anyone more fucked up than you are, live and let live, your rights end where mine begin. My worldview is basically rationalist, materialist, and scientific.

Other Interests. Well, Laura, obviously, though she's considerably more than an interest, she's my wife. And figuring out what to eat with all those hot sauces I've been buying. Damn, I was sure I had some other interests. Let me get back to you on this one.