Welcome to Chris Young’s Home Page
I’m very happy you found my little corner of cyberspace. I hope you find something interesting here even though it is very much a work in progress.
Whether or not you believe I was a human being at the time, it was at the moment of my conception that it was determined that I would have a genetic neuromuscular disease called Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 2. That particular fact has influenced absolutely everything throughout my life. I never walked as an infant and have used a wheelchair my whole life. SMA is similar to muscular dystrophy and somewhat related to ALS although significantly different from either one. If you want to learn more about SMA check out this blog post.
I was born on July 12, 1955 so you can do the math and figure out how old I am and I don’t have to keep updating this page saying I’m XX years old.
I attended Northwest High School and I have a B.S. in Computer Science from I.U.P.U.I.I’m single, straight, physically handicapped, born again Roman Catholic, liberal, Democrat. I live on the northwest side of Indianapolis just a few blocks from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
At the top of the page is a menu titled “Featured Essays”. Be sure to check those out. It includes an article about why this site is called “cyborg5.com”. There is also a page about my handicap and why I use the word “handicap” more often than words like “disability”. There is also a link to 2 autobiographical essays which I had published. They are “The Reunion” an award-winning article about the special education school I attended and “A Race Fans First 500” about the first time I actually attended the Indianapolis 500 after going to practice and qualifications for many years.
In addition to this website you can also read about me on social media.
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cyborg5 Most of my posts are public. This means you don’t have to be a Facebook friend or even be on Facebook to read it.
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/cyborg555 Mostly tutorials about the gadgets that I build but some of it is just biographical stuff like home movies.
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/cyborg55 @cyborg55 I rarely use this but I sometimes post links to other things that I write especially TV reviews from my entertainment blog.
- Email: firstname.lastname@example.org I already get so much junk mail it doesn’t hurt to publish my email address. Drop me a note and let me know what you think of this website.
The remainder of this website consists of six different blogs covering various aspects of my life. Here is an explanation of each of them including links to the most recent articles.
This is my personal biographical blog that I started as early as 2006 but drifted away from it for many years. Most of it is about my disability but some of it is commentary on current events or other miscellaneous topics that don’t necessarily fit into my other blogs. When you get to the blog, at the top is a menu titled “Featured Articles” that is different from the “Featured Essays” on this page. Be sure to check out those articles. They are actually in index to multipart blogs on particular topics.
Even if I wasn’t totally dependent on technology as a result of my disability, I still think I would be a technology freak. This blog will contain articles about my own technology uses and links to other articles about the latest in technology. I am a maker and electronics and 3D printing enthusiast. Here you will find descriptions of the assistive technology that I use including some tutorials on how you can build these projects yourself. Apart from my biographical blog this is my most active blog.
I was raised Roman Catholic by my mother but left the church in my early 20s. I then returned in my late 20s and have been actively involved ever since. I have taught Inquiry classes known as RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) for over 30 years at St. Gabriel the Archangel Catholic Church. This blog is a combination of RCIA lessons and personal essays about my own views on religion, faith, spirituality and the church.
I’m addicted to TV and movies. I’m over a year behind on watching some TV shows and I have to keep a spreadsheet to remind me what I’ve watched and what I need to watch. Periodically I read a large variety of TV and movie entertainment news websites. I used to send links to my favorite articles to friends who would be interested in them. However I couldn’t remember which friends got which links and I would keep finding more articles and having to send more e-mails. Finally I just decided to periodically aggregate all the links in one big e-mail and send it to a bunch of friends. The entries in this blog are duplicates of those e-mails. Later I started writing reviews of all of the new fall TV shows. I don’t review absolutely every show but I get quite a few of them. Note that in this blog you won’t hear entertainment gossip about who is sleeping with who or who got divorced or what scandal someone was involved in. This is just insight into what’s coming to your favorite TV shows and movie screens.
I am a lifelong bleeding-heart liberal Democrat. I’m also a political junkie. This blog contains my musings about politics in general.
For many years I’ve been interested in computer graphics especially ray traced rendering. I’m a former leader of the POV-Team who developed the freeware rendering program Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer – POV-Ray. Every year since 1995 I’ve created a computer rendered Christmas card. This blog includes links to images of my cards and will include articles and videos about how those images were created.