Everyone and everything matters, and nothing and no one is unaffected by the circumstances in which they function. It follows, therefore, that even the most celebrated among us know secret agonies, and even the most prosaic of us have transcendent moments. That latter observation fits me like a glove.
I've had what some would call a checkered, others an erratic, and still others a blessed life. I have two college degrees - a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Russian, and a Master's of Science in Computer Information Science. I'd hoped to become a translator with the first, and instead ended up working as a bookkeeper for a number of years. I had at first little idea what to do with the latter, thinking, at the time I applied for the program in question "Oh - computers - you can make money with that."
I did indeed make more money as a techie than as a bookkeeper. I administered (mostly Unix and Linux) systems; debugged and wrote software; and implemented and managed networks. But I didn't hit my stride until I began to teach computer science, and to write about it and eventually about other topics. In one way or another, I've been involved in those last two endeavors for over 20 years.
Actually, though, this path started, not with my Master's degree, but when I was three years old. That was when I experienced what i came to consider the two most formative events in my life. One I call the Ex-Lax Paradigm; more on that later. The other was the Disney film Wind in the Willows, whose hero was an ebullient, stubborn, wide-eyed, always-interested amphibian named J. Thaddeus Toad.
Toad became my hero and my role model. Hence the title of this blog.
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