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Please give a short bio of yourself for our readers. I�m a 58-year old retired rocket scientist. I was born in Washington DC while my father was an Army firearms instructor at Fort Belvoir and then I grew up in Nebraska. Then I spent 32 years as a rocket scientist at the Naval Air Test Center in southern Maryland, developing fearsome weapons so that our great and glorious nation can intimidate those grubby little petroleum exporting countries into selling us cheap oil to fuel our gigantic smoke-belching 6-ton SUV�s that clog up the highways and run my puny little bicycle off the road. Then, about a year after retirement eligibility, I finally decided, hey, what am I still doing here working for 38% of my salary? They�ll pay me 62% of my salary just because they can�t prove I�m dead yet! So I retired when I was only 56. Why did you choose this username? When I started doing chat rooms, I tried to use ErrantKnight but that�s such an unoriginal name. Too many other people had already been using it. Then I tried to be ErroneousKnight, but that exceeds the 12-letter limit imposed by some chat rooms. So I tried OrneryKnight. Well, that was okay, but then I decided OrneryPest sounded better. Why do you keep a diary online? I was inspired by about four other diaries (only one of whom is still active) and about how they could present their opinions and still be fun to read. So I decided to try it for myself. How important do you think a layout is for a web-based diary? Would you also comment on yours? Well, a layout has gotta be readable, and has gotta look okay on both the Microsoggy and Netscrape bruisers. Mine slightly falls short at this point. It looks okay on the screen, but if you try to do a printout with Netscrape Navelgazer the printout comes out all wrong. Since I generally use Netscrape for myself, this upsets me. But anyhow, I started out with a layout that stacked 32 entries all at once over on one page of my Geocities site. Then I figured I didn�t like that very well, so I moved over to Diary Land, leaving the original diary page as a Diary Intro page. I started out with a standard template and just started making changes a little at a time, and I�m sure I�ll keep on making changes from time to time. You can still detect vestiges of the original template. Oh by the way, I like the Diary Land templates reasonably well. The only problem is there are only a few of them so you get tired of seeing them over and over and over . and . over . and .(yawn). I was reading with fascination about your belief system. Would you share this with our readers, and how you came about adopting this belief system? I was raised in a �Church Is Good For You! It Just Is!� sort of family upbringing, not quite Bible-thumpers, but close to it. By the time I was about eight years old I started realizing I was gonna hafta relinquish either religious belief or power of rational thought, and I decided to try to hang onto rational thought because it�s more fun. I began to think the Bible was mostly a mishmash of fairy tales and primitive superstition, Christian morality is a weird combination of hateful spite and meaningless self-flagellation, Jesus as presented in the Gospels was a nice guy but sorta dim-witted, and the Holy Trinity is a logically impossible convolution. So, although I continue to participate in one of the more liberal wings of Christianity just for fun, I believe whatever I want to. And I don�t expect any other sane and rational person to agree with me. Hey, if two people agree on everything, one of them oughta be replaced by a burnt-out light bulb! I see you are an avid gardener, an accomplished woodworker, and a bike enthusiast! Share with us if you will, how you latched on to these three hobbies�and how much time you devote to these three hobbies. Well, I suppose you could add a fourth hobby, reading, maybe one of these days I�ll put up some pictures of my walls and walls full of books. Gardening is fun, now that I�ve got the space to do it. My total garden size is 97 X 101 feet, about a quarter of that is physically �under the spade� and I use all manual digging, no rototiller or other smoke-belching power equipment. Bicycling is freedom. My first bicycle was my father�s old bike that he had bought for $1 when he ran away from home during the depression. I�ve now done Cycle Across Maryland for seven years in a row, the last two years as a volunteer ride leader. I�m a member of one of our local bike clubs, the Patuxent Area Cycling Enthusiasts. I do a lot of riding by myself, and I host a short little ride every Tuesday evening for our club and anybody else who wants to show up. I think I�m familiar with every rut and pothole on every road in Calvert County Maryland. Woodworking is fun. My father had a rather large wood shop when I was little, and when I got into the seventh grade and took Wood Shop Class, I knew more than the teacher did. I�ve built book cases, beds, dressers, cabinets, hymnal holders for our church pews, an Altar Linen cabinet for the Ladies Guild of our church, and just lotsa stuff. Tell us about your Childhood�and how you have evolved into the �OrneryPest� that you are today! Well, I certainly don�t take after my father. In his career he�s been a fruit cannery worker, a firearms instructor, an air traffic controller, an aircraft engine mechanic, a bricklayer, a building contractor, a telephone lineman, a cream truck driver, a television repairman, a college physics professor, and a piano tuner. Somehow I got used to never knowing from one day to the next how to answer the question, �What does your daddy do for a living.� So I went off and stuck with one job for a 32-year career. Okay - every interview has it�s silly, nonsense question�so here�s yours: Who really wears the pants in your family ornery�you or your wife! and why? Hey, we�ve both got closets full of pants! Both of us are pretty independent people. Neither of us can dominate the other and we�ve both got sense enough not to try. But I wish I coulda been there in 1992 when my wife bought our old 1992 Honda Accord. She went to the dealer alone to select the car, and then I went up later to add my signature to the deal. The salesman told me all about it. It seems that my wife strolled up to the salesman and said, �Hey you, sell me that white one over there!� And he answered, �I�m sorry, Ma�am, but that�s a stick shift. I�m sure you�d really prefer an automatic, wouldn�t you?� So she grabbed him by the collar and shook him and said, �What�s the matter, you big jerk! You think a woman can�t drive real gears?� But anyhow my wife is wonderful. We don�t agree on much of anything but we don�t feel we need to agree on anything. Interviewed by Trinity63
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