The last 20 years

[jnichel]

After graduation, I went to Army boot camp, came back home and put a year in at LSU. Got bored with more school, wanted to travel, so I went from the Army National Guard to active duty Navy. Was in Orlando for about 18 months for another boot camp and my school, then spent the next 4 years sailing the high seas aboard the USS Sellers (DDG-11) and USS Ortolan (ASR-22). I got out of the Navy after the first Gulf War, and went back to LSU. After my junior year, I decided I didn't want to do the college thing anymore, so I went to work in the family business (electrical contracting). In '96 we were working a job for the Port of New Orleans, setting up two new container cranes, when I fell from one the out-riggers and broke my back. While recovering, I re-aquainted myself with the computer, and was able to break into the industry as a HTML monkey. With the dotcom boom, and a Fortune 500 company buying out the company I was working for, my career grew beyond that of the web. I'm now with a different company, and do mainly system administration with a sprinkle of programming mixed in here and there.

I got married in '98 to a woman I met on the Internet two years prior to that (wasn't thru a matchmaking place, we knew some of the same people in differnt chat circles....but that's a story for another day). In 2000, my first son was born (Denise, my wife, has a son from her first marriage), and just when we started looking foward to Connor's graduation from high school, and a quite house, we had another son (born November 3rd).

We have lived up in Buffalo, New York for 2 years now, and I still can't get used to this snow thing.