Tobias D. Robison

Hi all,

You can call me Toby. I've put in about 7,000 of the 10,000 hours it's supposed to take to become a virtuoso at writing, which is good, unless the whole 10,000 hour idea is hooey. Here are a few things you'd probably rather not know about me:

+ I drove a car for the first time when I was four years old. My mother was really, really angry with me.

+ When I was a kid, most children's daytime hours were unsupervised. Otherwise, I would never have been able to participate in the great, not world famous, two-day-long, full neighborhood MudFight.

+ My family moved to Long Island when I was six. Making the transition was traumatic. For example, if I had any hope of scoring a red crayon in kindergarten, I had to learn to say "Dibs!" (No one understood when I called "Eggies.")

+ I lived my childhood years in the days before personal game machines. I suspect you don't know what that means, because the kids I lived near were a bit odd. We didn't play "Cops and Robbers." We didn't play "Cowboys and Indians." No, we played "Death to the Infidel."

+ My childhood dentist had a rare, unusual name: Withal Rossein. His friends called him "With."

+ I have worked at least 75,000 of the 10,000 hours it's supposed to take to become a virtuoso computer programmer, and yes, I got very good at it. Once, I even programmed a computer that was built with vacuum tubes, rather than transistors.

+ I prefer writing novels to writing software, because novels are easier to debug.

+ For many years, I have been a classical music DJ. You can hear me at WPRB.COM (103.3 FM in central New Jersey.)