My name is Bradley L. Jones. My middle name Lee. I'll leave it to you to discover the endless humor that is having the last syllable of your first name the same as your middle name.
So what is my story? I was born in East Grand Rapids, very close to the Fourth of July in 1977. I haven't quite been able to determine exactly why, but my parents moved from East Grand Rapids to Cascade presumably because of some racial tension caused by the busing program. I can only note that the television show Roots came out that year. There have been stories that black kids went to school afterwards and punched the white kids. It doesn't take that much to scare white suburbia. That, and the house was probably too small for 3 kids.
I have an older brother, Kenneth Jones although everyone calls him Casey (He's named after my Dad's good friend Kenneth Clark, whose intials are KC... Casey get it, it took me a long time as a kid to piece that together). I also have an older sister Susan (aka Susie). My sister was married and had two kids, Sydney and Samantha. Now, my sister's husband turned out to be a tool, and she got a divorce. Not that he hit her or anything, but when you are married, sleeping with hookers is frowned upon.
So I grew up in Cascade until my Dad rightfully got fed up with the political situation at the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT), and decided to find another job. Eventually he landed one at the Ottawa County Road Commission and we (being myself, Mom, and Dad) moved out to Grand Haven. This was going into 9th Grade. I'm not going to say Freshman because I went from a Middle School in Forest Hills to a Junior High in Grand Haven.
Grand Haven can best be described as very awkward for me. I just never established any close relationships with anyone. Grand Haven is a very large school, but I never found anyone that I was really on the same page with. So, I concentrated on learning, and ended up graduating in the top 10% of my class and was awarded The Most Outstanding Math Student. So my name is on a plaque in the library.
I went to the University of Michigan. I again didn't do the best job of adjusting. However, I did do better. Although, I do have the rather dubious distinction of Graduating from U of M Summa Cum Laude, with absolutly nothing else to note. At the time, I considered honor societies that would let me in just for my grades elitist and not really worthy of my time. I spent my summers in between working at Brilliance Corporation (a job that just fell into my lap) and working for John Laird in the Quakelab.
During my time working at Brilliance I got to take the first crack at their website (which involved a ton of data entry, but it was pretty cool at the end), I had a crazy form printing fiasco, I spent a lot of time restoring resource forks for mac files that got nuked when the file server crashed, and spent a lot of time just doing IT. It was fun, and kind of stressful.
Working in the Quakelab was great, I also had the distinction of being one of the longest undergrad members. My first and second summer was spent working on VisualSoar and SGIO. Here is information about the soar tools. I'm proud of how both projects turned out.
Now, UofM graduation came around, and I didn't know exactly what to do. So I decided to go to grad school. Now, mind you, all the deadlines had already past me by. I was kind of stuck. In one of those wierd twists of fate, I ended up living with a bunch of friends I had back in elementary and middle school for a year, while I worked for John and applied to grad schools.
I don't know exactly know how to describe the year of limbo. Some parts of it were the some of the best times in my life, and other sections of it were without a doubt the worst. I came close to just moving home a number of times. I can't decide if it would have been better if I did move home or not. I just don't know what motivates people to do the things that they do. I can't describe how frustrating it is to watch people just nose dive into a trainwreck and being utterly powerless to stop them. Then, to try and help them pull their impaled body from wreckage, just to watch them run over to do it again the first chance they get.
After that, I was accepted to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and ended up going there. Unfortunately, I didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into. And ended up screwing myself academically (got a B+ in Operating Systems instead of an A-) and politically so that a PhD track was out of the question. Well, not exactly out of question, just significantly more work than I deemed it worthwhile. UIUC was a mix of the best and incredibly mediocre people, with a dash of the most bastard administrators I have ever met. I learned a ton, so it was a good experience not only academically, but also socially. Although, I'm not totally satisfied on how things turned out, but I'm as much to blame for that as anyone else.
Which leads up to the present, I'm living in Idaho with a friend from U of M. Looking for a job. And in general, just trying to keep my self busy.