My full given name is Richard Charles Steiner. Conjure with it if you want; I really don't care. :-)

I'm a largish roundish person (6'1", 330lbs, or 185cm, 150Kg), and I have long curly brown hair on most of my head as well as a full beard. I'm 43 years of age as of this writing (a Sagitarius, born early on the morning of December 3, 1962), and I grew up in Minnetonka, Minnesota, a western suburb of Minneapolis and part of the Twin Cities Metro Area , in the same house that my parents are still living in today.

While growing up, I went to Gatewood Elementary School (K-6th grade) and then to Hopkins West Junior High School (7th-9th grade), and I eventually graduated (after some small misadventures -- thanks to a boring curriculum, MTS, and MU,COMBAT,USMK001) from the now-nonexistant Hopkins Lindbergh High School in the spring of 1981 (Hopkins Lindbergh merged with Hopkins Eisenhower High School in 1983 to form Hopkins High School).

After high school, I spent the next several years attending college at Mankato State University, and after a failed attempt to find an interesting internship and far too many late-night roleplaying and wargaming sessions I eventually earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science (with specialization in "Systems Programming") and a Minor in Mathematics) in the spring of 1987.

Until recently I lived in a relatively nice (well, I like it!) townhouse in Eden Prairie, Minnesota (another western suburb of Minneapolis) with my wonderful wife Sarrah (a talented artist with her own >) and four wonderful housecats named Nacho, Bebe (pronounced bee-bee), Suki, and Libby. Pictures of the kitties are here. :-)

Bongo passed away in the fall of 2003. We miss him a lot. :-(

Since late September 2004 we've been living in the Atlanta area, initially in this little rental house (really bad pictures taken with my little Palm m100 PalmPix camera) in Smyrna, Georgia, a fairly nice suburb in the northwest corner of the Atlanta metro, and then in this nice 18-year-old house in nearby Mableton, Georgia. We've been there since July 1, 2005. Yay!!! :-)

I've been working for a company called SITA (short for "Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques", or "International company of Aeronautical Telecommunications" in English) as a Programmer/Analyst (my title is "Lead Analyst", but I'm the only person on my team at this point in time). After almost 18 months, I love this new job!! :-) Sarrah has just started working in the customer support center for Home Depot, and it seems to be going fairly well for her so far as well.

In case anyone's interested, here are a couple of semi-accurate pictures of me staring blankly into my Color QuickCam, here's a photo of me getting ready for another foray into the wild and wooley world of USENET :-), and here's a picture of me with Sarrah.

Oh, yeah, here's a few wedding pictures, too!

For those who might be interested in some of my preferences and beliefs, the following is a link to my Geek Code (feel free to click here if you do not have access to a decoder ring).

While the MECC Timesharing System had introduced me to both real-time chat and to interactive gaming (I was *GILDOR*/UN=H7LT263 if anyone cares), I really started my online activities in 1989 after I had purchased my first modem (a 2400bps Intel modem) and discovered the local BBS community here in the Twin Cities (the local MOOBASI BBS list at one point had well over 300 BBS systems listed!). After spending time on FidoNet (Net 1:282), RIME, and and I'Link using QWK readers from such places as PC Library, Byteline, Haven of Rest, and Freezing Point, I moved on to various AOL, GENie, and Delphi technical forums, and finally made it to the USENET discussion groups in the fall of 1993.

I'm currently a semi-active participant in a number of newsgroups (around 70 or so), though not as active (due to a greater frequency of high-priority real-life interrupts) as I was a few years ago, including the comp.os.os2.* and comp.os.linux.* hierarchies and rec.travel.air. Maybe I'll see you there! :-)