Thanks to @juliesbits for reminding me (with her own #introduction) that I never posted one of my own.

Who am I? I'm a middle aged white guy who found himself quite lost for a while. I think I've started to find myself again, and with that I've been bringing my mental health back into some semblance of normalcy again.

I've been a technophile for about 40 years. Yes, I do remember the days when home computers had very little memory. My first computer, the Commodore Vic-20, had 3353 *bytes* of free memory for me to write my own code in at startup. Not K, not M, not G or T. Just individual bytes. My current computer has enough memory to hold all of the memory of that first one more than 10,000,000 times over (yes, I just used a calculator to figure that out).

Unfortunately, due to the way my life went, I didn't do a whole lot with them that I could have. Mental health issues have been present for my entire life. Until very recently, I couldn't even acknowledge them, so dealing with them has never happened until the past six years (when I began therapy). I'm still improving, still growing, and still learning who I am.

On the happy side, one of the things I've discovered has been woodworking. Right now, my main focus is actual carpentry, since my woodworking space (my garage) was never actually a safe place to work. I've been doing a full renovation, right down to replacing the framing inside, and I'm really enjoying the process. It's slow, to be sure (one person, learning from youtube, and then trying out the techniques until I am successful), but I'm making real headway. I hope to post a video about the re-framing next month sometime. Eventually, I plan to get into making high quality wooden versions of tabletop games.

I'm also pondering how I can use my technology skills to improve the woodworking for me. For instance, I want to make wooden dice. However, keeping those balanced will be a challenge, so I'm pondering implementing a computer vision system with an automated dice roller to check if an individual die is out of balance at all.

As for musical taste, my friends will tell you I have none :) I listen to some classical style, some symphonic rock, and too much pop rock. Some rap is good, country and western is enjoyable, and I'm willing to give most anything a listen to find out if I want to hear more.

Finally, one lesson I've learned that is too important to keep to myself: Different people value different things in different ways. That sounds obvious, but learning it took me a long time. As a technologist, I used to laugh at people and make fun of them for being unable or unwilling to do basic things like install their operating system for their computer. I had a friend of mine (who passed away some years ago) teach me how wrong that was. He was an accountant. He was intelligent, friendly, and patient. He couldn't format his own computer with a video walk through. Despite that, he knew what he was talking about. Once I understood that it wasn't stupidity, but rather a lack of priorities, my whole world shifted. Just like I can't change my own oil, he can't write code.

Different people have different priorities. Them not having *your* priorities does not make them at all lesser. It just makes them different. If you learn to work with them, so that your priorities can complement theirs, you will make everybody's lives richer. That lesson came from him, and I will always remember how important it is.

I've always described myself as an eclectic individual. I think I've shown it through my own introduction above. I try to be open, so if you have questions, feel free to ask away. The worst I'll do is say that I'm not comfortable answering it.