The Boring Stuff
Name in real life (aka): Grant B. Cooper, III e-mail: casey@gbcnet.com
	With my daughter, Chloe

About Me

I am the proud father of one daughter, Chloe and I married to my wife, Faz, on October 26, 2002. Currently I do consulting work for cities in the area of sales tax, especially as it relates to helping recover misallocated local revenues. I graduated from the University of California at San Diego in September of 1996 where I earned a double major (or dual degree, depending on who you ask): a BA in Urban Studies and Planning and a BA in History. Between 1998 and 2006 I worked as a Business License Inspector for the City of Newport Beach, due in large part to the internship I took with the City's Planning Department. My accomplishments during the internship included marking up the City's Zoning code in HTML format, creating a sign inventory database for the commercial areas of the Balboa Peninsula and creating the Building Department's web page.

While in college, I worked for two on-campus cafeterias to help pay bills, buy toys, and keep myself generally occupied. In fact, I worked at the cafeteria until January, 1997 when I decided to quit and try my luck getting a career job. I was also able to develop interests I already had, as reflected in my majors, and learn new ones. One new interest was computers and the Internet. I did enjoy computers before college, but I only knew the basics of operating them, such as how to turn one on and never to remove a floppy disk while the light was still on! I now consider myself quite proficient with computers and I have built several new ones and a couple others from scratch, using old parts, for my family as well as learning the ins and outs of MS-Windows client and server systems.

The advent of the Internet has really made a big change for me. Back in 1991, my freshman year of college, it was little more than email and the dreaded UNIX shell. Believe it or not, I had one of the snazziest modems around - an ATI 2400 Hayes compatible. Now, a high-speed Internet connection is literally a thousand times faster! My interest in the Internet really picked up after Mosaic and Netscape actually made it fun to browse around the 'Net. Back in 1995 I created my first Web page, and I since have enjoyed expanding it. Of course, I enjoy perusing all the information that has become available right on my desktop.

The Internet has finally allowed me to find a way to express my lifelong love of roads and highways, and I am gratified to find there are many like me out there. I have spent a lot of time authoring my Historic California US Highways Site and a page that I may even finish someday about State Highway 56 in San Diego. I want to contribute something to the wealth of knowledge available as well as putting my observations about old highways (and sometimes just highways in general) into a document. I learned more in the first years looking in the Internet about highways than I had from 15 years of experience looking in libraries.

I originally lived in Laguna Beach, California until I moved to San Diego for college. Laguna is an absolutely beautiful town on the Orange County coast that seems hundreds of miles away from the sprawl of Los Angeles and suburban Orange County. I consider myself very fortunate to have been able to grow up there. I graduated in 1991 with some sort of honors from Laguna Beach High School, an event that culminated my many years of Laguna public schools.

The one thing during my teen years that I can say beyond a doubt was the best thing I ever did was staying with the Boy Scouts. While I understand the objections some people have to this organization, I will always remain firm in my conviction that it is an excellent organization that encourages good values. Not only that, Boy Scouts also provided me with the opportunity to camp and hike in some fantastic places including the Grand Canyon and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico. Through sublimation and hard work, I earned my Eagle Scout, an achievement that means more to me than anything else I have ever done.

Well, enough preaching. Now that I have bored y'all to tears, I want to thank you for reading this far. If anything, at least you know now who the crazy guy is who put up these pages! I also want to thank you for your interest in my page and I do hope you see them again soon.

The Story Behind My Name(s)

My legal name is Grant B. Cooper, III yet my friends know me as "Casey." The name Casey has nothing to do with my legal name, but it was given to me to avoid confusion with my father, who is Grant B. Cooper, Jr. My parents chose "Casey" since that was the name of one of their friend's child, and they thought is was a neat name. Works fine for me. The B. stands for Burr, and I hope it is self evident why I don't go by that. My grandfather, for whom I am named was himself named Grant Burr Cooper after a friend of his parents, Grant Burr. That is, in a large nutshell, the explanation of my multiple identities.

Resume

I have an on-line version of my resume and that is available to whoever may want to look at it. You can clearly see why I'm working as a business license inspector

Have a look at my Resume.

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Casey's Page

http://www.gbcnet.com/casey/bio.html