I’d been wondering all day how to introduce myself. Fortuitously, Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber gave me the perfect segueway, by reporting that the job market for philosophers is not as bad as I thought.

You see, I’m a philosophy grad school dropout. I have an ABD from the University of Rochester. I was in a PhD program from 1992 to 1997. In May of 1997, faced with a dissertation going nowhere, the loss of my funding, and a bleak outlook on the job market, I left Rochester and returned to Memphis, where I had attended Rhodes College as an undergrad. There, a friend of mine hooked me up with a job at a Mom and Pop ISP doing web page design and tech support.

And now Brian has gone and made me wistful for what might have been. I really can’t complain, I suppose. I really enjoy being an all-purpose computer geek, and I certainly make more money than I would in Academia. But I do miss the intellectual stimulation, the esoteric conversations that lasted late into the night. And I regret that I left just a few weeks before the death of Professor Lewis White Beck. I was one of his last students.

Anyway, check out my philosophy page if you’re into that kind of stuff. All the papers there date from grad school. And if you’re in Memphis, and feel like sitting around, drinking beer, and discussing philosophy, drop me a note.

In the next few days, Signifying Nothing will be gaining a new co-blogger: Brock Sides. Brock met more than enough of the desired criteria to qualify; I’ll leave it to him to decide whether he wants to specify which ones.

Brock, like me, has led a relatively interesting life; he started out as a philosophy grad student, and is currently working as a computer administrator in Memphis, Tenn. He’s currently the president of GOLUM (pronounced like “Golem” from Lord of the Rings), the Linux user’s group in Memphis. Brock’s somewhat to the left of me ideologically, but he shares my (perhaps-not-always-met) goal of keeping the tone relatively sober.

I hope you’ll give him a warm welcome and I think he’ll be a great addition to the blog!