About The Digital Man

I was born Christopher Reidy Merlo on the 7th of September, 1972, at Union Hospital, in a section of New York City known as the Bronx. My parents John (self-employed) and Joan (a Ph. D. in Sociology) are overly intelligent people, and I am fortunate to have inherited their love of wisdom, as well as my mother's liberal arts talents and my father's scientific skills.

About four months after my birth, my parents and I moved to Hollis, Queens, yet another section of New York City. My mother once told me that a person's earliest memory can bear an uncanny resemblance to the rest of his or her life. I can vividly remember sitting on the fire escape of that fifth-floor apartment on 204th Street teaching myself to whistle. Interesting, considering that one of my two loves is music. I couldn't have been more than four years old at the time. I started violin lessons in kindergarten. Around that same time, I was introduced to the other of my loves - computers. My mother bought a TRS-80 with a whopping 4K of RAM to help with her dissertation research. I taught myself how to program in BASIC on that dinosaur, and I've been programming ever since.

I gave up the violin in second grade, by which time my family and I had moved out to Rockville Centre, in Long Island. But in fourth grade the bug had bitten me once again - Mom and Dad's Eagles and Billy Joel 8-tracks had made a lasting impression on me. In fourth grade I played trumpet, followed by trombone in fifth grade, piano in sixth, and guitar in seventh. I never really enjoyed any of these, however. As much as I loved music, I didn't have the patience to practice.

I went to Chaminade High School in Mineola, N.Y., a private Catholic high school. Here I had the opportunity to foster both loves. I entered original computer programs into the Math Fair every year - they sucked, but it was better than researching boring theorems. I also met the MojoMan (whose parents call him Frank) in sophomore year. I bought my first bass - a Harmony - to jam with him and his drummer friend. We've been in bands together ever since. I've also subsequently fallen in love with playing bass. It was sometime that year that I discovered Rush, which pushed my drive to be a better bass player.

After graduating high school, I attended Manhattan College in the Bronx for three semesters. After that, I transferred to Molloy College. At Molloy I double majored in Mathematics and Computer Science, and minored in Philosophy. While at Molloy, which was conveniently located in my hometown of Rockville Centre, I became a volunteer firefighter in the Rockville Centre Fire Department. I also started tutoring and consulting for extra cash for bass strings, which I went through fairly rapidly gigging and recording with my two original bands, Polio Dog and Vision.

I soon decided that as much as I love music, I wasn't ready to rely on it to put bread on the table. My tenure as a volunteer firefighter has taught me the value of helping other people, and my experience as a tutor and a consultant guided me toward my career choice - teaching college. I took the GRE exams, scored a perfect 800 on the Mathematics section and a not-too-shabby 790 on the Analytical section, and based on that and a 4.0 senior-year GPA, earned a Teaching Fellowship at the University of Vermont, where I earned my Master of Science degree in 1997. I am now a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Computer Science Department of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, where I am a first-year Ph. D. student.

So, here I sit, writing about my life, pursuing a doctoral degree in Computer Science, still picking up the bass when I get a chance, and spending my free time developing this web page, and the others you'll find here. And that's all I have to say about that.