I live in the town of Christiansburg, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of southwestern Virginia. It's a nice place to hang one's hat.
Likely you know me as Silvan. That's an interesting story in of itself, but suffice it to say I've been using that name so long that if my wife and children ever had occasion to call me by my first name, that's the name I'd expect them to use. I'm not trying to hide my real name. It's just that I like Silvan better. Perhaps this is simply my answer to the age-old problem of how to stop people from calling me "Mike."
I graduated from Radford University in 1994 with a BA in Spanish and French with a minor in Latin. Unable to find a job in my field despite my skill with foreign languages, I worked for three years at Wal-Mart before deciding to become a truck driver. I have been a truck driver since October of 1997. It's not exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up, but I still haven't come up with any better ways to earn a living.
Here's a shot of me in Cub Scout regalia, in my workshop, posing with a Marples chisel in a block of wood. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time...
Being a Cub Scout dad and a truck driver is a tough order to fill, but I do what I can. I'm nominally on the Pack Committee, but I can never make it to the meetings. I lead the Scouts on nature walks, show them the sort of stuff I can do with tools and whatnot, fix things that need fixing, and otherwise try to be useful. I'm very proud of my involvement, limited though it may be, and I work very hard at leaving my bad habits at the door whenever I don the uniform.
Anyway, my current black hole for time is working in the shop. Ever since I built the shed and got all the non-making-stuff-related crap out of my shop (there's still lots and lots of making-stuff-related crap out there, and the place looks terrible), I've been logging a lot of hours out there. I finally got around to making a shop page so I could let people on the Wreck (rec.woodworking) see my sorry little hole in the wall, and some of the projects I've produced.
I'm also a big Linux guy, and some of you might have caught me during one of the periods of interest where I was hanging out on alt.os.linux.mandrake a good bit. Mostly these days I just use the stuff, and I'm beyond caring what anybody else is doing or pondering the greater meaning of it all. I'm still nominally a Rosegarden developer, and one of these days real soon now I'm going to get off my duff and start looking at what's going to need to happen in order to update Rosegarden to export to Lilypond's new format. I've done a few icons, most of which have been replaced, and I added a very complicated event filter that no one else uses. One of these days I might even get around to finishing the tutorial I started which got me in the door in the first place. Probably this and more once the weather turns crappy, because I don't have any heat in my shop.
