My full name is Douglas Aldridge. I was born on December 20th 1973, in Coventry, CT, but within a couple years my family moved to Hebron, a small, semi-rural town 20 minutes east of Hartford. It was a very nice town to grow up in.

I lived on Slocum Road and attended Gilead Hill Elementary School. Over the years, my parents had two more kids, Karin and Megan. Megan was born on my tenth birthday. Pretty cool, especially when you're ten. When I was young, my parents owned several Volkswagon microbuses. The one I remember was called Oblio 2, named for the main character of Harry Nilsson's album "The Point."

I went on to attend RHAM Middle School and RHAM High School. By then I had met my good friend Geoff Willis, aka the Doctor or Mufu the Meaningless. Anyway, we both were on-line then, in a sense. We were at 300 baud, I with my Atari 1200XL and Willis with the Commodore 64. Those were the early nascent years of my computer fetish, which eventually led to the vanity page you see here now.

For the last two years of high school, I attended a magnet school in Hartford as a trumpet player in the jazz department. It was called the Greater Hartford Academy For The Performing Arts, and it was a blast.

After graduation, I attended Ithaca College for a semester, and then Central Connecticut State University. It was at CCSU that I met the craziest of my loony friends, Jim Pack Jr. At the time, Jim was deep in his "Kevin Costner as Jim Garrison in JFK" phase, carrying around assassination files and such. As I said, he's crazy. By then I was heavily into the Grateful Dead, and in 1993 I left school altogether to catch the '93 Boston Garden run. Not long after I left Connecticut, my friend Rob Ferullo came up as well, and we moved to Somerville, MA, where I remain to this day.

So that's how I ended up here in Somerville, with my cat Bertha and my wife Stacy. We currently live on Laurel Street near Union Square, which is home to several excellent local pubs (including Somerville's best dive bar) and, most recently, a killer comic book store. Friends have suggested that I've gone native since I spent a few years driving for Green Cab (they're probably right). I also design web sites and obsess about the Red Sox - both full time occupations.

Go ahead, send me some mail!