Bio

Portrait of Avdi

The Basics

Name: Avdi Grimm

Background: Born July 5, 1980. I grew up in rural Carroll County, MD, where I was homeschooled through high school. I attended Carroll Community College from 1996 to 1998. In 2000 I married a remarkable woman named Stacey. Since 2001 we have been Living in Southern York County (between Baltimore, MD and York, PA) with two stepchildren and miscellaneous dogs and cats. We are expecting a new addition to the clan in August 2008.

Work: I have been learning programming languages and writing software since the age of 14. I began working as a full-time software engineer at Raytheon in 1998, at the age of 18. Since July 2007, I've been working at MDLogix creating software for clinical researchers in Ruby on Rails.

Hobbies: Learning new programming languages. Playing the guitar. Hiking. Watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 with my whole family. Photography. Playing games of all kinds, electronic and otherwise, with my friends and family. Enjoying good scotch, bourbon, and micro-brewed beer. Collecting and using coffee-brewing equipment. Supporting local music. Learning about the intersection of myth, religion, philosophy, and psychology. Reading science fiction.

Some Salient Particulars

(With apologies to Chuck Norris and Zed Shaw.)

Avdi was born on July 5, 1980 to a wandering hacker-cleric and an outcast Gypsy princess.

Avdi was born in Nashville, TN; aka "Music City". Shortly after his birth God personally came and gave rock & roll to Avdi as he lay in a basinet.

Avdi has visited India on several occasions, for reasons that have never been entirely clear. It is known, however, that during one of his visits the evil king of the Monkey People swore eternal enmity with him, forcing him to live in a state of constant vigilance against monkey attack.

Having endured years of training in his youth, Avdi has achieved a black belt in the ancient and mysterious art of "Jew-Jitsu" - a mental discipline enabling the adept to affect others through non-action. It is said that he can cause the weak-minded to do his bidding simply by staring at them and radiating an air of faint disaproval.

Avdi wrote his first original computer program in the REXX language at the age of 14. It was an interactive fiction piece, telling the poignant tale of two rooms and the cat which was in one of the rooms, and not in the other.

When Avdi opens badly-written software code in Emacs, the code spontaneously refactors itself out of shame.

Avdi pves in south-central Pennsylvania with a beautiful yet deadly Irish warrior-poetess, her two children, four cats, a dog, and a small herd of mischievious sentient machines.