About Richard McCutchen
A little about me eh, well in a galaxy far, far away...of wait, wrong story, sorry.
I was born way back in 1968 on the U.S Naval Base in Kodiak, Alaska. I lived in
the state of Alaska for the first 8 years of my life, with my mother, father, 2
sisters and my brother. It was shortly after that that I moved to the state of Georgia,
a small (well at that time it was small) town of Dalton, Georgia, with my Grandmother
and my dad's side of the family.
I spent the better part of my teenage years being raised by my Grandmother (that's
a story we won't go in to), and knew at a very young age that I was destined to
be a nerd. We were referred to as "Nerds" back in those days, we have since been
promoted to "Geeks" by society, and are commonly accepted nowadays. My first computer,
that I remember clearly anyways, was a wonderful Commodore VIC-20. Ahh what a wonderful
piece of equiptment that was, with it's 5KB of RAM and it's 8-bit processor, man
those were the days, sitting around plugging away with Basic, Pascal and the likes
of MUMPS for countless hours, forgetting that anything else even existed.
It was that little computer, well as small as they could be in the early 80's, that
completely transformed my life, that made me who I am today. I graduated from Richmond
Academy with a 4.0 average when I was 15 years old, and had my first degree (Bachelors
majoring in CS) from the University of Georgia when I was 20 (took a year and a
half off before college to "be a teenager" for a bit), and had my Masters by the
time I was 23. I have worked in the IT/programming field for 15 years (professionally)
now, and can't see myself ever doing anything else.
Computers have been good to me, they have allowed me to provide for my family while
doing something that I love to do. My passion is programming, if I'm not writing
code for my employer, then I'm writing freelance code, or performing Moderator duties
at Dream.In.Code, a fastly
growing programming community. If I'm not doing one of those then I am playing video
games with my son (we've beaten all three Halo's already) or outside with our animals
(1 Black Lab, 1 Minature Schnauzer, 1 Herrin Terrier, and 10 cats), or even tending
to the garden.
Where Is He Now?
I currently reside in a small town (yes even smaller than Dalton Georgia) called
Valley in Washington State. We are out in the country as most would say.
We are approximately 50 miles South of Spokane, Washington, which is Eastern Washingtons
largest city. I have become a self proclaimed "High-Tech Redneck", and am quite
proud of that. THough I live way out in the country if you were to come into my
home (no you're not invited, I dont know you that well yet) you would enver know.
I have wireless access points in my home (and one on the porch for sitting outside
and surfing), 4 computers, 2 servers, the works.
So that's where Im at now, in my opinion I've come a long way from that pimply faced
nerdy teenager who was plugging away writing code just for fun, well I guess I havent
really come that far after all have I?
What Does He Like?
Well like most of my species I like programming, no let me rephrase that, I love
programming, I feel I was put on this planet, brought into existence, to be a programmer.
Not a mere Code Monkey,
but a real, true blue, die hard programmer. I know you know at least one or two,
someone who can speak and read in binary, someone who firmly believes that the answer
to all of lifes questions are a series of ones and zeros, ones who firsly believe
that it will come to pass that all coders will rule the world, yes one of those
is what I am
But, *Shocked Face* I do actually have other interests than taking over the world
with my new application I'm working on (can't tell you what it is or I'd have to
kill you, and you don't want that now do you?). Granted there arent like a ton of
other interests but they do exist. I'm an avid reader, and no I'm not referring
to programming books and technology whitepapers, though I do read my fair share
of those, but real reading, real books. My favorite author of all times is Dean Koontz. Sorry Stephen King fans but Koontz is a much
better writer, well it's true and you're too stubborn to admit it.
In fact I currently own over 60 Dean Koontz books, even his real old stuff he wrote
under different pen names years ago. And, yes I'm always on the lookout for Koontz
books I dont currently own. All the ones I do own I have read at least once, some
multiple times. Another thing I really love is the NFL. My wife knows that from
8AM Sunday until 8PM Sunday that the big TV in the living room is mine, I need the
bigger screen for NFL Sunday Ticket through DirecTV, with it I can watch 8 different
games on a single channel, talk about football nirvana (or complete overload according
to my wife). Next comes, of course, video games.
I'm not a diehard at as some that I know, but I do play a mean game of Halo and
Rainbox 6 or Splinter Cell. I love my XBOX 360, it's wireless network adapter
(hey Im a geek did you really think I wasnt going to have WiFi on my 360, get real).
Notice the video game interests are far outweighed by other things, like my family.
As I get older, I just turned 40 *EEEEEEEK*, my family means more and more to me
(whether they believe it or not, you know how those normal humanoids are).
But I do truly cherish my family, and would do anything to keep them safe and fed.
What's He Doing Now?
Well I recently completed my MCSD and MCAD Certifications in both VB.NET and C#
and have completely fell in love with C#, she's really ind of sexy if you ask me
(just dont tell my wife *evil laugh*. Right now, currently, I'm writing some data
encryption algorithms using C# for the company I work for, you know the I have to
make sure the bills are paid and the family has food job. Then for my Hey I gotta
have my tons and fun too you know Im creating a web application complete
with custom HttpHandlers to take care of perfectly proportioned thumbnails, watermarking
and the like. I just finished a class library to handle URL rewriting, and it even
handles truly hackable URL's
Well thats enough about me, well even though this site is about me. There will be
blog post's that will allow you to follow me a little closer, so for now run along
and at least check out some of the other areas of the site. Thanks for reading
Richard L. McCutchen