NOTE: Everyone who argues whether the millenium started Jan 1, 2000 or Jan 1, 2001 is just plain wrong. The start of a millenium is a wholly arbitrary decision. As far as I'm concerned, it started with my birth.
- Learned to understand, speak, read,
& write English & Italian. La mamma è italiana.
- Read a lot more than was probably healthy for my future social life. But, I was in bed with asthma a lot. What should I have done, submitted to the opiate of the masses and watched TV?
- Walked the aisle at the altar call to join Hilton Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist Church, around age 12. Maybe 10. Somewhere around then.
- Labored as a lawn mower, paperboy, and fast food employee (Hardee's). As a consequence of Pavlov's principle, I now hate the smell of grease.
- Attended the Governor's School for
Math and Science at Virginia Tech University in the summer of 1988.
- Spent prom night working at Hardee's. The basketball team captain brought his date to say hi & bum a Sprite off me.
- Learned to program in BASIC. I am not proud of this.
- Learned rudimentary Latin. Salvete omnes.
- Graduated salutatorian from Warwick high school.
- Labored as a fast food employee (Wendy's), math tutor, math grader, research assistant, and computer programmer.
- Learned to program in Pascal, Modula-2, and C. I did not choose to learn C; it was foisted on me. To my dying day, I will wish C had never seen the light of day, and wish Modula-2 had become the dominant systems-programming language.
- Worked as a programmer one summer for Contemporary Cybernetics and one summer for CEBAF (now Jefferson Lab).
- Graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor's Degree in Mathematics and Mathematics Education. I minored in Computer Science.
- Labored as a teaching assistant and a math tutor.
- Entered into full communion with the Catholic Church at the Easter Vigil in 1994 at Nativity Catholic Church (now Nativity Chapel).
- Discovered the Liturgy of the Hours.
- Fell in love with a woman & had the courage to admit it to her. To our surprise, the feelings were mutual.
- Read a fascinating excerpt from Srinivasa Ramanujan's notebooks on continued fractions that neither I nor my thesis adviser could decrypt. So, instead of writing a thesis, I took an oral exam.
- Graduated with a Master's degree in Mathematics.
- Taught Technical Algebra, Algebra, Math Analysis, and Honors Math Analysis. Ran after-school tutoring.
- Summer of 1996: volunteered for mission work in Jersey City, New Jersey at Christ the King parish.
- My fiancee and I agreed that I needed to explore a religious calling. We broke up. She later married a great guy and they now have two sons and two daughters. I am godfather to the second daughter.
- First fortune cookie from a dinner at seminary: There is yet time to take a different path. Thought it was kind of funny, at the time...
- Read a lot of theology and philosophy (obviously), including Karl Rahner, Luke Timothy Johnson, Raymond E. Brown, and other stalwarts of contemporary Catholicism, without neglecting Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, and others in the Catholic tradition.
- Read perhaps a bit more about exorcism than I should have. Possession is a real phenomenon, and it's pretty terrifying.
- Visited a lot of sick people in hospitals. The patients probably taught me a lot more than I taught them.
- Summer of 1998: served as a resident seminarian at Holy Family Catholic Church in Virginia Beach, VA. More hospital work.
- Learned some Spanish.
- I once considered this the happiest time of my life. I decided to leave, against the advice of just about everyone involved in my seminary formation.
- Note: During the 2002 priest-sex
abuse scandal, many people have alleged a pervasive subculture of homosexuality
within the Catholic priesthood. There was even a book published that garnered
a lot of attention.
I myself am decidedly heterosexual. I did not observe any homosexual activity at my seminary. I did not observe anyone advocating it. What I did observe was a very mature and very healthy view of sexuality that MTV and its ilk sorely lack. I did observe a lot of heterosexual men talking about healthy relationships they had had with women. Some, like myself, had left a relationship to pursue God's call, and this was not easy. Never did I observe the widespread dysfunction that so many people allege. These allegations constitute a slander against the most decent men I have ever known, largely for reason of Church politics.
This is not to deny the existence of a homosexual subculture in the Catholic priesthood. I merely repudiate the notion that such a subculture is accepted, encouraged, or even of such mythic proportions as has recently been tossed about in the press, including certain Catholic authors who are more interested in polemics than truth.
- I was officially a "lecturer in computer science" although I didn't lecture one bit in computer science. (groan)
- In reality, I supervised computer labs, and lectured in two math courses.
- Learned Java in my spare time. Wrote some pretty darn good educational applets. Also studied Oberon and Eiffel. I much wish people would teach these languages instead of C-based languages.
- Courses taught/teaching at NC State include:
- Calculus I
- Concepts in Mathematics
- Precalculus Algebra and Trigonometry
- Differential Equations
- Ph.D. research in Computer Algebra. Studied:
- the Macaulay matrix (also known as the multivariate Sylvester matrix);
- the behavior of Gröbner bases under composition;
- ways of deciding, or detecting, that an ideal basis is a Gröbner basis.
- My advisor was Hoon Hong.
- Course taught at Meredith College: College Algebra.
- Courses taught at Durham Technical Community College: Trigonometry and Calculus II.
- Taught at a Huntington Learning Center for five months.
- Took up biking to work for exercise, to save money on gas, and to satisfy the small part of my conscience that strives for "environmental responsibility". (That's also why I grew a beard the summer of 2002: they told us to conserve water since we're in a drought. I shave the old-fashioned way to conserve electricity, so...)
- Dissertation Title: Combinatorial Criteria for Gröbner Bases Under Composition. There's a copy in my office, if you'd like to see it.
- Graduated with a Ph.D.
- Fell in love with a Russian pen pal and visited Russia three times.
- Married during the summer of 2005. This was a "buy one, get one free" deal, so I also acquired a son.