I was born August 9, 1972 in Souix City, Iowa to Tim and Donna McBride. Since this was over 30 years ago, most of the details are pretty fuzzy to me. However, my mother assures me I was in fact born. She also claims it was a hard labor, and that the stress almost killed her. Apparently, this is some sort of inborn goal with me as I have continued giving her excessive stress every day since then. Alas, I have failed miserably at getting her to keel over as she's still alive and kicking. In my defense she's a pretty tough old broad. At least I have managed to give her quite a few grey hairs.
Growing up, in addition to trying to kill my mom with stress, I also went to school. I started school at Bluewater Elementary in Grants, New Mexico. According to my parents, I came home after the first day of kindergarten and refused to go back as "those people were dumb." My parents assured me that I would eventually start learning. Personally, I suspect they just wanted to inflict me on those poor, unsuspecting teachers.
In third grade, we moved to Townsend, Montana. There I attended Cecilia Hazelton Elementary. This was followed by Broadwater County High School. Although they had two different names, and were in different buildings, they were on the same lot. Obviously this was a small school.
As a senior in high school, I rewrote the school's report card generation program...in BASIC. While I'd like to say how cool I was and that I stuck a sekrit backdoor in that let me change grades to whatever I wanted. In reality, it never occured to me. Besides, how cool can you be when you're programming in BASIC?
Prior to my senior year, I'd applied to the United States Military Academy at West Point. I was accepted in December 1989. While there are definite advantages to having been accepted to a college or university early, it also makes it really hard to motivate yourself to put effort into your last bit of high school. Fortunately, I'd been overloading prior to this point, so my last semester was nothing but really easy electives.
