About

Me

I’m no longer a young man, but I don’t feel old. I’m firmly attached to the label Geriatric Millenial. I live in the North Dallas suburbs with my wife, three young children, and two dogs; at age thirty-nine, I was diagnosed with a mental disorder of ADHD. The treatment of that disorder is what has led to this blog. Professionally I am the Vice President of Engineering at Synq3, an AI chatbot company. I was an engineer for about 10 years before this job, primarily working on distributed software systems.

My hobbies revolve around learning; reading is my first love, but I learn best by beating my head against something until I or it passes out from exhaustion. In a lot of cases, it’s me doing the blacking out. I also love fishing, going on adventures with my family and traveling with my wife, powerlifting, football, archaic books on history and philosophy, complex and demanding video games (Elden Ring), and trying my hardest to impart a sense of the world and community to my children that does not involve living their entire life online.

Blog Name

My hometown of Paris, Texas, has been blessed with several stubborn Yankees (my grandaddy among them). In 1881, one such Yankee and Union Civil War vet named Willet Babcock of Ithaca, New York, passed away. Before his death, the businessman (known to have a strong sense of humor) asked a stonemason to build him an impressive memorial that combined his love for Roman marble statues, his passion for his adopted hometown, and his love for Christ. The result is the 15-foot-tall “Jesus in Cowboy Boots,” currently at Evergreen Cemetery in Paris, TX. Christ leans on the cross, and in his movement, his feet are exposed, and which are wearing a pair of cowboy boots with riding heels.

In a rather classic case of art superseding the need for accuracy, Jesus is pictured wearing a long tunic to expose and highlight the fact that he is wearing cowboy boots. In reality, long tunics were worn only by the upper middle class and wealthy as status markers, just as in 2023, most men wear mechanical watches only as status markers. In Mark 12:38, Jesus explicitly warns people “to be wary of scribes that walk around in long robes (tunics) and like respectful greetings in public places (emphasis mine).”

Handle Origin

Before the dawn of time, in 2001, the Baylor Computer Science Department assigned usernames to new students based on their dorm+room number. My first UNIX¹ username was born: penland365.