Brian Casey:  

Life My family moved to Cheney, WA when I was two years old so nearly all of my childhood and teenage years were spent there. I attended the Campus School at Eastern Washington University (called Eastern Washington State College at that time) for kindergarten but failed out (yes, I flunked Kindergarten). Fortunately for me, success in the Campus School kindergarten was not a requirement for entry into first grade at Betz Elementary School (nor as I found out later at all necessary for a successful life) --and it was an upward journey for me from there. After I graduated High School I moved away first to attend college in Seattle then after graduating from college I moved away to my first job in Texas. I met my wife, Mary, who was from Baltimore, MD, in Texas while in an internship program. After we married we moved to NJ where we could both have careers and raise a family. I have two daughters who are in their 20s who mean the world to me. Mary died in June 2006 - I am adjusting to her loss. Despite moving so far away for such a long time many of my closest friends I made are from high school and college. I still have many ties to the PNW - returning there someday to live is a possibility I might consider. Now I am fairly certain that I will remain in the NJ, PA, DE, MD area. Regardless of where I live or what I do for a living the last few years have taught me that we all have an unknown amount of time to spend. This time we have can be spent wisely doing what we love doing and with those that we love or it can be wasted doing something else... it's really just as simple as that. briankc at ieee dot org will get an email to me - I'd love to hear from any of you. School: I lived and went to school in the town of Cheney from Kindergarten through High School; there are people in my High School Class that I have known throughout that entire time - which was rather cool. As I was growing up, I quickly realized just how rare my experience was. I think I was a very shy person when I was a teenager (I am not that shy now) - being a more self confident and outwardly focused person would have made me a much better classmate and friend. I made some lifelong friends at Betz Elementary School - it's really great to know people who you remember as a small child and vice versa. Some of my best childhood memories were exploring the pond behind Chet's Flowers with Mike Crabb and building snow forts with my brother, Sean, and the kid next-door, Robin Dare. The small town experience was a blessing and a curse: it seemed to me everyone knew (or thought they knew) each other's business and teachers often seemed to think that if you were somebody's brother or sister that both of you were cut from the same bolt of cloth which not often the case. On the positive side it seemed to me as though we were all from a single community despite all the different things our parents did for a living and their socioeconomic class.… Maybe this common bond was an illusion to me, but I believed that Cheney schools were a kind of "self contained" microcosm of our larger community. It seems so different to me here in the northeast where social classes seem much more stratified and exclusive. While I liked most of my teachers (my favorite teacher was my fisrt grade teacher Mrs. Moriarty) I was much more heavily influenced by my peers: Karl Neuhannn, Mike Lee, John Hennessey, John Vickrey, Andy Mills, Mike Kran and Mark Gray. It was great fun to have such an interesting group of friends. My parents made them all welcome in our home. I didn't really do anything wild in HS except for the typical things that many teenagers do. My life didn't turn out the way I expected - work turned out to be much easier for me than school, and it seems that persistence matters in the outcome of just about every endeavor I have undertaken - I think I am pretty good with the persistence thing. My original ambition afte...Expand for more