About Me

Here’s my story: I grew up in New Mexico, and got a B.S. in Computer Science at New Mexico Tech. After two years with a company in Albuquerque, I got a job with what was then AT&T Bell Labs and moved to New Jersey. That’s where I met my wife Margo. We were transferred to Indianapolis (what had been Western Electric, back in the day). Then, after a couple of years in Salem, Oregon, we settled down in Fort Collins, Colorado, where I was employed by HP.

It was in Colorado that I first sensed a call to pastoral ministry; we moved again, back to New Jersey, where I attended Princeton Theological Seminary. After graduation in 2006, I accepted a call in California. In 2012, I received a new call to a church in Alaska, where I currently serve.

Hobbies, etc.

You might guess, my hobbies include computers. I have a plan, someday, to install MediaWiki on this site, and use it to publish things that don’t lend themselves to publication as blog entries. If and when I do that, I’ll tell you all about my computers. In the meantime:

• vi. People who use emacs all go carpal, just like RMS and Gosling. It’s a matter of time.
• My favorite programming language is ruby. I can stumble through Python or Perl (the latter, barely). For most of my career I used C, then C++, and finally Java, but I haven’t used any of them in years.
• From sometime before 1997 to 2003, my favorite operating system was Linux, and I was involved with the Northern Colorado Linux User’s Group during that period.
• Since 2003, I’ve been a Mac fanboi. (Earlier than that, actually: my first personal computer back in 1985 was a 512 KB “Fat Mac.” But that was the last Mac I owned until 2003, when I bought a 12” iBook G3 for seminary.) We have a 20” iMac and a 13” unibody MacBook Pro. Feel free to send me an iPad to round out the collection.

Outside the computer field, I like taking pictures. You can see some of my favorites on Flickr. I also like to listen to music, watch movies, and read books. I like going on bike rides with my kids.

Find Out More

You can learn still more about me in the usual places, or by asking your friend, Mr. Google.

Note: Luke is actually my middle name. You’ll want to search for me under the name “S. Luke Jones”. If you just query without the “S,” you’ll find about 14,800,000 hits, mostly various Welsh soccer players. But if you do include the “S,” then you ought to be able to find me without any trouble.

Today, the name “Luke” is quite common. But I was born before the premiere of Star Wars, back when “Luke” was about as popular a name as “Zeke” or “Obadiah.” I’ve never understood why, of the four Evangelists, the only one whose name nearly died out in the U.S. was the one who’s most accessible to Gentiles. Go figure.

Anyway, “Luke” is a family name. I’m named after my great-great uncle Luke Short. He was a charming fellow. There’s an example of his handiwork in the Boot Hill cemetery in Tombstone:

But not being named for Luke Skywalker doesn’t mean I don’t like teh Star Wars. Here’s my old .signature, from way back in the day.

        O            "I used to bull-eye Womp Rats in my T-16
    O  OOO  O         in Beggar's Canyon back home, and they're
  OO    O    OO       not much bigger than that."
 OOOO  OOO  OOOO
 OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO      S. Luke Jones (...ihnp4!mtung!slj)
  OOOOOOOOOOOOO       AT&T Information Systems
     OOOOOOO          Middletown, NJ, U.S.A.

That’s a hint. It, and the machine name nmtvax, should to be enough for you to find my old netnews posts on Google’s Usenet archive.