Vital Statistics:

• Name: Earl Robert Kinney III
• DOB: November 2, 1978 (that makes me a Scorpio, if you care)
• Height: 6 foot even
• Weight: see for yourself
• Marital Status: Single, but very happy in my relationship

That really tells you nothing about me though. What follows here is an ever-evolving abridged biography of my life.

The Amesbury Years (1978-1983)

I was born in Newburyport, MA to Bob (his name is really Earl too) and Sally Kinney. I have two older sisters, Mari and Sam. We lived in Amesbury, MA until my 5th birthday. I don't have too many memories of living in Amesbury. I once got lost driving around in town, not recognizing anything only to find out later that I had been driving around in my old neighborhood. Most of my time was spent at Donna's, a family friend that ran a day care operation. Both my mom and dad were working, so they needed a place to put me during the day.

Eventually, both my parents were working in Southern New Hampshire, so rather than continuing to make the long commute, the decided to move closer to their jobs and we settled in Merrimack NH at the end of 1983.

The Early Merrimack Years (1984-1989)

One of the first memories I have of living in Merrimack was falling into the above ground pool behind the house. My mom told me to be careful, but I leaned a little too far forward and ended up going head first into the pool fully clothed. I was pulled back up within a few seconds, but my mom made sure I learned how to swim that summer.

I attended all 12 of my required schooling in the Merrimack school system (Mastricola Elementary, Mastricola Middle, and Merrimack High School). While I was in elementary school, I got into a lot of trouble because I had a hard time controlling my temper. I often got sent to the consouler (or principal)'s office because I'd thrown something across the room, or screamed in the middle of class or some other such nonsense. One particular time, I swore at my teacher because I had lost a game of around the world (a game that involved math flash cards in which the the first person to beat everyone else in the room, or "go around the world" won). I proceded to tip over my desk, scream, then go cry in corner... good times...

Probably the highlight of my time in elementary school, the story I'll tell to my kids, is the time I got with a Playboy at school in the 4th grade. At this point in my life, I already knew everything about the birds and the bees (christ, one of my first words was "boobies"), and I was corrupting my classmates. We were talking about "naked pictures" (porn wasn't part of our vocabulary yet), when I mentioned my father's collection of Playboy magazines that stretched back into the 50s. Upon hearing this, a couple of kids challenged me to bring in one to show them as proof. I naturally accepted. I went home, found a magazine that I thought my dad wouldn't miss (it was in a pile that had been untouched for some time), and put it in my backpack for the next day. When reccess came that day, I snuck the bag out to the playground and a small crowd gathered around as we flipped through the magazine over the next 15 minutes. When it came time to go back inside, I put my magazine away and lined up to go back in. I got a few protests from some of the kids that hadn't had a chance to see the magazine, but I flatly told them I wasn't going to risk taking it out again. This would turn out to be my downfall.

When we got back inside my teacher confronted me, told me she knew what I had brought out in my bag, and that I should just give it to her. I tried to deny it, but I was dead in the water. I ended up in the principal's office where I got a lecture about not exposing young boys to such "vulgar material" (the principal was female). She called my parents, at which point I thought I was screwed. I ended up with no detention (not sure how that one happened) and the principal sent me off, sans-magazine. When I got home, I thought for sure my mother or father was going to kill me. My mother though, was more pissed at my father than she was at me. The only thing my mother ever said to me about it was "God wouldn't like you showing naked pictures of women to other boys." My father on the other hand, was told in no uncertain terms that he was to dispose of his collection. I cried a little that day...

Teenage Angst (1990-1997)

As I entered my teenage years, I had already started to put on the pounds that have followed me to this day. Funny thing about that is that kids can be mean, especially when they can get a rise out of someone. I became the perfect target for all the kids with nothing better to do than make other peoples' lives miserable. I became depressed, which of course only made me eat more, which just continued the cycle. Of course, no one really wants to go out with the fat nerdy guy, so I spent all of my teen years single. Middle School went by about as fast as 3 years can and I moved on to high school.

The worst (but in some ways the best) about my time at Merrimack High School was my family's involvement in the school. My mom has been a teacher for over 20 years, teaching math. My freshman year I was to take advanced Geometry. There were 2 teachers teaching it that year, my mother and Mr. Filiault. When I was signing up for classes, they told me that I had to have Mr. Filiault (of course my senior year, when my sister was teaching Calculus, they had to let me in that class because of the rest of my schedule). Freshman year of high school went pretty much they way all of middle school, I was miserable and thought about transfering to private school for a change of scenery. After a lot of thought on the subject, I decided I would tough it out another year.

Sophmore year is where everything really changed for me. That was the beginning of what would become "The Crew". It all started when myself and my long time friends Mike and Jeff decided that we wanted to date some of the girls in our math class. We decided that if we got a giant group of people together it would be less akward. So we planned to get together at my house to watch some movies. This eventually became a regular event; one week it was movies at my place, the next it might be bowling or games at someone else's place. Over the next 3 years, quite a few relationships came and went in the group, which of course caused its problems in the group dynamic. One particular point of contention was when 3 seperate guys all wanted to go out with one girl, Laura. My friend Mike ended up with Laura, a relationship that lasted almost 3 years, but the comical thing was one of the other guys forever marked the day the relationship started as "VM day" or "Victory Mike Day".

In school, I excelled at math and science classes, but had lots of problems with any class where I had to write. It was before my sophmore year that I got my first PC. It was a 486DX 60MHz machine prefabbed by Dell (my mom got the educator's discount). My curious nature took hold and a poked around on my new toy, trying to figure out what I could do with it. When I saw that my high school offered a programming class, I knew I had to check it out. I took to it like a duck to water. I was in a class with a couple of other kids that were like me. We pushed each other to do bigger and better things. We developed libraries that would play music in our programs, we started implementing more complicated UIs. Josh Hawkins, probably the one of the best programmers I've ever met, actually developed a whole GUI development library complete with buttons, text input fields, and multiple windows. I did help him with some of it, but he just took the ball and ran with it. Josh and I took the second year programming class together and when we ran out of classes to take senior year, we (along with 2 others) started an independent study in C (2 years later, a programming class in C was being offered). From that first year on, I knew what I wanted to do with my life; I wanted to write software.

I played around with a few other tech oriented things in high school; I took Electronics, Mechanical and Engineering Drawing, and joined the FIRST team. FIRST was a great experience for any aspiring geek. They give you a bunch of parts and tell you to build something and give you some experienced engineers to work with to help you along. I got involved more in the 3D animation piece of the competition, and our animation actually got nominated for the finals.

When senior year rolled around, it was time to decide where I wanted to go to school. I was of a singular mind that not only could I get into MIT, but that they would be stupid not to take me. I took a tour of the campus and fell in love. Boston (well Cambridge, but same difference) is a great place to go to school. I applied for early admission thinking I wouldn't have to apply any where else. Fate had other plans. I got deferred to regular admission, but I still figured I would get in. I applied at a few other schools (including UNH as a last ditch safety school) but really didn't want to go anywhere else. So when the rejection letter from MIT came, I was crushed. Out of the rest of the schools I had applied to I decided to attend Northeastern University in their College of Computer Science. The coop program looked really appealing to a teenage kid that had only worked at a fast food restaurant before.

When graduation time came, I ended up finishing 20th in my class of some 300 students. I figure I probably could have made the top 10 had I applied myself a little harder in those English classes, but I wouldn't discover the art of writing papers until college. That summer was filled with lots of parties, but mostly work. I was working at a local Wendy's at the time, doing the late shift (5PM to close). All the work was worth it though when Mike, Jeff, and myself embarked on a road trip to Virginia. The trip consisted of 4 days: day one was the drive down to Virginia which my father mandated I drive all of (my parents lent me the mini-van); day two would be spent at King's Dominion amusement park; day three we would travel and spend the day at Busch Gardens Williamsburg; then the fourth day we would return (again, I did all the driving). It was one of the most exciting things I have ever done. The 3 of us loved it so much, we did it again the next year but included Six Flags over NJ as the first leg in the trip and brought 3 other people with us. The end of summer was particularly rough for me because Northeastern started their fall classes so much later than all the other schools. I spent my last month of the summer working with none of my friends around. As I headed off to college, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to get by without the group of friends I'd come to know.

The Purple Haze, AKA the College Years (1997-2002)

When I entered Northeastern I only knew 2 other people, 2 kids from my graduating class who were also going. Neither of them was even close to being what I would consider a friend, so I pretty much started from scratch. Like many other Universities, NU packs their freshman in rooms like sardines, and I was no exception. My dorm room Freshman year wasn't much bigger (if at all) to my bedroom back home, except I had to share this one. My roommate was a Business major named Kabir. We got along OK at the beginning, but it didn't take long for us to get on eachother's nerves.

Classes were fairly easy that first year for me. I probably could have petitioned to get into the more advanced classes, but I was too timid to push. That first quarter I was taking Calc 1 (which I had done in HS), Intro to Programming (again, did it already), Western Civilization, Two Seminar classes in CS (one was for the honors program), and a class most people, myself included, referred to as "retard English". The reason I was in the remedial English class was that during orientation we were given a writing sample to determine placement. I had no desire to do it, so I did a really half-assed job and they placed me in the remedial class. Again, had I wanted to I could have petitioned to get out of it, but in this case I think it actually helped in the long run. The only class I had any trouble with that first quarter was the Western Civ class. I had such a hard time doing one of the papers that I ended up not getting it in, which cost me a full letter grade.

Winter quarter got much worse for me on a personal note. I had made some friends on my floor, but they were also friends with my roommate Kabir, who had begun to openly hate me. I would find out later that he was talking shit about me behind my back, and they believed everything he said. So as I having so many problems with friends at school, I started to reach out to keep in contact with my friends from high school. It was at this point that I started playing the MUD Dragon Realms again. I had originally started playing when the game was free on AOL (my parents ISP at the time). They had since moved to the web, and I had stopped playing, but some of my friends continued. So I signed up again and conicidentally on my first night back in the realm, I ran into my friend Mike. He had also been having problems with people at school, and was also retreating into the MUD. This would start a year long obsession for us of playing DR at any free moment.

At the end of winter quarter Kabir had had enough of living with me, and moved in with someone else on the floor whose roommate had left school. I never got a replacement roommate, so I effectively had a single for the rest of the year. This really didn't do a whole lot for my personal life. For the most part, if I wasn't in class I was in my room, on my computer, playing DR. About the only other time I left my room was to go down to Harvard Square to persue my other new obsession, Japanese Animation.

This is an evolving document. Check back as I add more.
Last Modified On: June 24, 2007. 11:24:35 am