I was born and raised in West Tennessee, my parents and I lived on a small 4 acre farm.  We grew strawberries, watermelon, corn, beans and peas.  I spend many hot days working in the fields and driving tractors.  We also owned a Harley Davidson and Honda motorcycle shop.  During high school I repaired motorcycles with my Dad.  I also took piano lessons for many years and competed in the National Guild competitions.  I also enjoyed working with electonics, a hobby that lead to an interesting in Radio.  The high school librarian observing my strong interest in electronics suggested that I attend a ham radio class taught by her husband Ed Holmes, W4IGW.  After the class I passed the Novice license requirements and became WD4NJR.  Before I started college I upgraded to extra class and switched my callsign to NQ4Y.

After I graduated from Humboldt High School I moved to Cookeville Tennessee to attend Tennessee Technological University.  Although I began my college career majoring in Electrical Engineering, I quickly learned that my talent was in computer programming.  I graduated from TTU with degree in Computer Science.  During college and after I worked in radio broadcasting.  I was an on the air personality at WGSQ and WPTN in Cookeville, TN.  I also worked a short time at WSMT FM 105.5 in Sparta.

We moved to Tullahoma in 1991.  I worked at ERC, a R&D firm in the UTSI research park.  I developed software at ERC.  In 1993 the company decided to start an ISP.  We started with a Sun Sparc II and two 9600 baud modems.  It wasn't long until we spun this into a separate vendor "The Edge."  From there we moved the ISP to Nashville and became EdgeNet Media.  I was an owner and the manager of technical services.  This was an excellent opportunity and a very enjoyable time. 

After EdgeNet Media I went to work for Broadcast Music Incorporated (BMI) on music row in Nashville. I wrote the BMI Repertoire software, the first searchable catalog of song title, writer and publisher information on the Internet.  I worked in the new technologies group for BMI.  I also supported the BMI webcrawler project, a tool that searched the Internet for unlicensed media usage.

Another area I enjoy is live sound engineering.  I attended Maranatha live sound engineering training in the late 90s.

y current work assignment is at Aerospace Testing Alliance in Tullahoma.