Meet Your Host

Tim grew up in southern Arizona, where he developed an aversion to cold climes and an affinity for slushy fruit-and-ice beverages. As a child, he became a devotee of superhero comic books and Star Trek, which would be the major pop-culture influences on his development. The larger-than-life adventures of the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and the crew of the Enterprise appealed to young Tim's imagination and his gelling sense of idealism.

At the age of seven, Tim was bullied by bitter children of bitter Republicans and was prevented from disembarking the school bus until he told the bullies he had voted for Gerald Ford, who had lost the 1976 election to President Carter the night before. He had not, in fact, voted for Ford or Carter, as he was 11 years shy of voting age, but the encounter did spur him to pay attention to politics in the future. Today he is a staunch Democrat and would have many clever comebacks to choose from if again accosted by pre-teen Republican bullies.

Tim had the extreme privilege of attending Kino School in Tucson, an interdisciplinary, alternative-style environment that encouraged free thinking and creative development; he graduated in what is still the largest graduating class in the school's history: 14 students, in 1987. The following autumn he enrolled at the University of Arizona, where he achieved better-than-average grades until flunking out of an entire semester after having had his heart shredded, chewed up, spit out, stomped on, pounded into pulpy mush, and handed back to him by his girlfriend. Not that he was ever bitter. He returned to the U of A for a time before deciding the best thing to do was Get Out of Dodge.

In January 1991, Tim moved to Seattle, Washington, where he has held an assortment of jobs, furthered his college education, and for a time pursued professional cartooning. (His comic strip, "Phil," was ultimately rejected by every major newspaper syndicate in North America but had a loyal following among people he knew. The strip can be found at StarshipTim.com/phil/strips.html.) Some years later, after newspapers lost their mojo, he tried a web-based comic strip called "Cloud Five," which proved to be difficult to maintain while also having to devote time to actually earning a living; officially still on indefinite hiatus after years of neglect, that strip remains online at cloudfivecomic.com.

Tim's first job in Seattle was at The Space Needle, selling trinkets and volcano dirt to unsuspecting foreign tourists for about a year. After that he worked at the University Book Store, where he met several people who would become near and dear and remain his core social circle well after leaving the job; as a contract worker at Microsoft for a number of cycles doing quality control on the Encarta Reference CD/DVD-ROM package; and for the baseball magazine The Grand Salami, where he honed his skills as a desktop publisher. Later on he worked as a contractor for the Disney Internet Group for a little more than a year, placing and troubleshooting web ads. In 2003 he "set up shop" as Constellation Design, a one-man web and print design & production business.

Having had the good fortune to be born to well-traveled parents, Tim has been able to see much of the world. To date he's been to Mexico, Canada, Egypt, Italy (briefly), China, England, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. He's picked up a little Spanish and French along the way and studied enough Japanese in college to get by for a few weeks in the Land of the Rising Sun. He has yet to go to India or the Moon.

A baseball fan since infancy, Tim is a Seattle Mariners season ticket holder and can often be found in the upper deck of the ballpark by Elliott Bay with a corporately-sponsored name, where he has been known to expatiate on the merits of the stolen base and the evils of the designated hitter rule. His all-time favorite ballclub is the 1985 St. Louis Cardinals and he dreams of the day when another team can win a championship primarily with jackrabbit baserunners and without a 25-homer man.

Tim also watches way too much television.