Who am I?




I am a 29 year old fool from Houston, Texas, with a penchant for talking too much and goofing off at work - which means that blogging is just about the perfect pastime for me. I started this blog on a lark, but then I found out that people were actually reading it - even some people who didn't previously know me - and it's just kind of grown from there. At first, I would write these long masterpiece-type entries, but over time it's become more of a hit and run type thing with brief comments whenever I find an online news article that catches my eye or have a thought that needs to be shared with the world. I will still occasionally go off on something and use a lot of words and paragraphs, but not as much as when I first started the blog. I have work to do nowadays.

As far as professional details go - I am employed by a big mean merchant energy company in Houston as a coal and emissions trader - in its most basic form, I make spot purchases of coal for our power plants to run on and I also represent my company in the federal emissions allowance markets thus making sure we are in compliance with federal regulations. I have the coolest job in the world, by a long shot. I attended Harvard College in the early nineties and (somewhat undistinguished-ly) graduated with an undergrad economics degree in 1996. As is the case with most people, the Harvard experience had a profound influence on the making of the person I am today - I believe strongly in free markets and capitalism and that not enough people ever stray far enough from home to gain a healthy perspective on the rest of the world, and I learned to have a healthy respect for the history of knowledge and western culture. I also have an MBA from Boston University, but about the only thing I got out of that besides vocational accounting and finance skills was a healthy disgust for the federal student loan program.

My political beliefs tend towards the right side, though as I have grown up I have moved away from pure libertarianism and a little bit back towards the center because, like Alexander Hamilton, I think that there are some decisions too important to be left in the hands of each and every individual citizen purely for the sake of even-handedness. I still feel that people have the right to think for themselves, but like every good conservative economist, I believe that there has to be a (very small) bit of government handholding else morality gets overrun by the individual selfishness that is programmed into each of us. Please don't get me wrong - I am no liberal - those credentials are reserved for my lovely girlfriend, Rachel, a graduate of Mr Jefferson's university who apparently never read anything ever written by the man.

(That was a joke! HA HA! A joke - errrr - nevermind...)

Personally, I love to run for exercise and am just now finishing up training for my second marathon to be run on January 19, although I think with my build I am more suited to 5k and 10k races and will focus on those in the next year. I am quite active in my church and like to play poker whenever I am able (there's a dichotomy for ya!), mess around on the computer and the internet, garden, and take care of my 7 year-old Labrador retriever, Bo Jackson. ("Bojak" for short). Someday I also would like to write a book, but damn if I know yet what it will be about.