We are happy residents of Ithaca, NY.

I grew up in Powder Springs, 12 miles southwest of Marietta, GA. I went to Norway as a Youth for Understanding exchange student in my junior year of high school. Before then I was a total computer geek. Norway made me interested in history and other cultures. When I returned from Norway, I left McEachern High School as soon as I could, and went to Kennesaw State College (nowadays a University) for International Affairs.

At that point, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I moved to Seattle. It was the thing to do back in the mid-90s. After a moment of inspiration on the Ballard Bridge, I decided to study history. So I applied a few places, and the next year found myself in the MA History program at Clemson University. There I took a Nazi Germany class with Don McKale, and met my (future) wife, Diana Dimitrova. Two years later, we got married and moved to Buffalo so I could start the PhD program at SUNY Buffalo with William Sheridan Allen (The Nazi Seizure of Power).

In the summer after the first year at UB, Diana and I went to Bulgaria for the summer. (Diana is Bulgarian, from Byala, which is halfway between Rousse and Veliko Turnovo, which is in the northern middle of the country between Sofia and Varna.) It happened to be the hottest summer in 40 years, just after a hyperinflation that had devastated the country’s economy. We drove all over the country, including a week long visit to the country’s capital, Sofia. My body having an adverse reaction to all the feta cheese, I was always on the lookout for a bathroom, of which there were few. I thought I was in luck at the National History Museum – until I saw just holes in the ground with ceramic footprints and no toilet paper.

So what? The country has since gotten back on its feet and even joined the EU. The history museum has bathrooms. Flush toilets are never far away anymore. People are generally happier; fewer people are fleeing the country, and more are having children. The point is, rather, that I was reading books about Germans in the Nazi period who went to Eastern Europe and had similar reactions, and those reactions had a pivotal influence on their awful behavior. Had the Nazis occupied and done brutal things in Bulgaria, I would have studied the German occupation there. Alas, they did occupy Poland, for the longest time of anywhere. So Poland became my surrogate for Bulgaria. For the next six years, I made a life out of studying German reactions to and behaviors in Poland, framing it in a theory of colonialism that didn’t start to take off until I had pretty much gotten out of the history business.*

No regrets there. Diana and I had moved to Ithaca in 1999, when Diana got a job as Foreign Student Advisor at Ithaca College. She loves it. We have been here ever since. After a few years of adjuncting at SUNY Cortland, the fine people of Gorges Web Sites announced they were looking to hire a web developer.

I had been “developing” web sites off and on since “the dawn of the Internet.” I was probably the first person to turn in a final exam on the Internet – Clemson, 1995, Rameth Owens’ Appalachian History, I turned in a slip of paper with a URL to where my answers were. Then I did the history department’s web site, and my own course web sites. By 2003 web design had become a hobby – Santosha Yoga Center, Dominique Fry, massage therapist. It was not a great stretch to do it full time, and get to do all those things that “if only I had more time, I could learn how they do THAT.”

And now that’s what I do. I get to work with great colleagues – Chris, Matt, Greg, Ted, Sean, and Danny – doing pretty much what I used to run home from school to do when I was 12. I get to live in a beautiful place. I get to help people directly by making them look good on the Web, and help them accomplish their goals. And I get paid well too! How life takes its turns.

*I haven’t gotten fully out of the history business. It just isn’t my breadwinning vocation anymore. I have presented papers at three conferences over the last year, and might be one of the few people who would take vacation time to write a paper and take it to a conference. If you want to do something on Nazism and colonialism, *please* drop me a line.