I suppose it's worthwhile posting something up here, although I know quite a few of you well, and know even more by name if not personally, there's always room for new sim pals...
I'm just this guy, you know?
My virtual aviation career started somewhere around FS2 or FS3. Many a fun time tootling out of Meigs... I also got very into military sims, and spent long hours with F-14 Fleet Defender, Falcon 3 & 4 and its descendants, etc. In 2002 I was introduced to the concept of VATSIM by a co-worker who was a PPL and dated from the SATCO days. I conducted my first flight online from his kitchen table using my PC which I had carted over there for some hands-on training
I became totally engrossed in the network and its potential and capabilities. Over Thanksgiving of 2002 I decided to become an ATC student, and for some reason was matched up with the sly old dog himself, Ian Elchitz. Ian taught me everything one needed to know about how to run SFO_TWR and I was off and running. I eventually transferred to my 'home' region of ZSE once that ARTCC stabilized itself a bit, and served two terms as assistant chief of the ARTCC and also became an ATC instructor myself.
VA-wise, I've flown for a couple, and served staff for MetroAir, where I built their ACARS and a couple other toys.
In 2007, I spent about two weeks and made a cool little site called
http://vataware.com to keep stats for my own amusement... 4 million tracked flights and 20,000 hits a day later, it's become my claim to fame in the sim world, as it were. I also served for about a year or so on the VATSIM Board of Governors as VP of Web Services and built the current VATSIM stats center (
http://stats.vatsim.net/) before having to step down due to time constraints and a lack of passion to fight the political battles.
I work as a director of technology for a digital marketing agency (basically, I manage web development teams). I live in wonderful Portland, Oregon, the best city in the world, am married, and am expecting a daughter in April. I'm interested in getting my PPL and may start on it this summer... or maybe next summer.
I've booted around commercial network concepts with various sets of friends for years, but we never came up with anything feasible. Keith's crossed all of the bridges that we were stuck on and put in a hell of a lot of hard work and I have a feeling it will start snowballing very, very, soon.
I'm in the process of 100% converting to X-Plane (just did my first successful XC flight last night...) so keep an eye for the plane out there with training wheels on as I try to adjust from, oh, 15-20 years or so of Microsoftness...