Hi! I started building this web site in December, 2003. It resided at the att.net web host for a little more than six years. In 2010 AT&T discontinued broadband service in Denver, so I was forced to migrate to a new location, at covad.net. I did get to keep my e-mail address at att.net -- that has been unchanged since 1995. This web site lived on covad.net's server for about three years, until the spring of 2013.

In 2013 Kathryn and I pulled up stakes and moved to Canyon Lake in Texas. With a new phone number came a loss of free web page support. Our new telephone company, GVTC, claimed to offer such a package, but I couldn't figure out how to make it go, and the tech support guys couldn't figure out what was wrong. Recently (Sept. 2017) I decided that I want to put all this stuff out on the web again, so I bought a domain name and signed up with a web hosting service.

Generally speaking, I'm interested in computer programming, mathematics, economics (Austrian School), and political philosophy. I have about 20 years of experience working as an actuary in the life insurance industry. I spent many of those years programming computers, mainly in IBM assembly language (although I also have extensive experience with FORTRAN, COBOL, and BASIC). About 2002 I installed LINUX (currently Leap, a relatively stable OpenSuse release; orginally version 9.1 of OpenSuse) on one of my PC's, and I'm learning how to talk to that OS (actually, to BASH, the Bourne Again Shell) as time permits. I've also been getting some practice coding simple C programs. C seems to fall somewhere in between FORTRAN and assembler -- it's a higher level language, but it allows direct access (via pointers and data type declarations) to some fairly low-level machine features, like addresses, and using characters as numbers, or numbers as characters, etc.

I have done my best to make these pages look good in many different browsers, at screen resolutions from 800 x 600 up to 1280 x 960. I'm also working to get the font sizes set right in both the Windows and Linux operating system environments. Right now, it's working well with Firefox, Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, and Google's Chrome. If these pages don't look good in your browser, please let me know about it, and I'll try to make them even more browser-friendly.

If you stumble across this page and you'd like to drop me a line, please feel free to send me an e-mail message. Oh -- I used to have an automated guest book feature, but I lost that capability in the migration away from AT&T. You can still view the old entries, though, in a slightly modified format. And if you want me to add your name to the guest book, just send me an e-mail message and say so.

These days I spend quite a bit of time talking to people on the Wall Street Journal's web site via their commenting engine. Some of the people there have re-kindled my long dormant interest in poetry. So I'm coding up some new poetry pages for the web site — click on "Poetry / Word Games" below to access those new pages.

I have recently (2019) become interested in the documentation project at KDE. As my first project, I created new documentation for KAddressBook, the personal contact management component of KDE's email program. You can see the new documentation over here. (The documentation will open in a new tab. The documentation consists of roughly 25 web pages and 100 images. It's a self-contained unit, so once you're over there, there is no easy way to get back to this home page, except by switching tabs.)

I have more recently (2020) been involved in an extended discussion of the meaning of the phrase "natural-born citizen", as it is employed in Article II, Section 1 of the federal constitution. Maybe I'll memorialize some of that discussion on this web site, provided my friend Jed -- with whom I had the discussion -- gives his consent.

While I was digging through a bunch of material relating to the "natural-born citizen" clause, I ran across an article in a law journal that shows how to access thirteen different dictionaries (most via GoogleBooks) that were in use around the time of the American Revolution. When it comes to the constitution, I'm definitely a member of the "original public meaning" camp. So I've built an index to those thirteen dictionaries, which may be useful to other students of American jurisprudence. I'll try to improve it as time permits ... just keying in all those URLs was a chore.

Thanks for stopping by! D. Bryant