(Ryan’s resume can be found here.)
Ryan J. Markel is a husband to Amanda and father of four living in the greater metropolitan St. Louis area. He has been an electronics salesman, team manager, busboy, web designer and coder, software product manager, and pastor-in-training, though not necessarily in that order and certainly not all at the same time. Having been born in the first year of the decade, he truly is a child of the 80’s, and the both random and somewhat weird pop culture references he uses in everyday communication serve as a testament to that fact.
He was born in suburban Detroit, Michigan, lived in another suburb for his entire childhood and most of his adolescence, and then moved at some point to live in Bowling Green, Kentucky, which he considers to be his hometown and nice place to have lived. Because of school and other factors, he’s also lived in suburban Chicago, Illinois, several cities in the greater St. Louis area, and even a year in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
This has a habit of royally messing up his sports allegiances. Ryan is therefore a fan or a follower of the following teams in the following sports: for baseball, you can’t beat the Detroit Tigers, but the St. Louis Cardinals now come pretty close; for basketball, the pros are the dumps, but for college hoops you’d better believe it’s the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers; for football, it’s WKU, but it’s also Michigan Wolverines football (and has been for longer), but in the pros, it’s the Green Bay Packers (if you ask for an explanation, do you want a long story about Barry Sanders?); and for hockey, the incomparable and storied Detroit Red Wings do the (hat) trick. He also has a sick fascination with watching curling.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Theological Languages from Concordia University–River Forest, and a Masters of Divinity from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, though he is not a rostered pastor of the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (or any other church body) and does not currently practice the vocation of shepherding.
Ryan has been blogging in one form or another since sometime in 1998 or 1999 (the entries from that long ago are now lost to the mists of time and non-standardized blogging engines, including one he constructed himself back in the day), which is not long after the term itself was first coined, and almost certainly before you had heard what a blog was. He also has largely had no idea what to do with the medium for the majority of that time. What you see here now is primarily thoughts, anecdotes, quotes, and media snippets, together with commentary from someone who sees things through the particular worldview of being a young husband, father, and Lutheran.
He’s also a pretty big geek. Ryan will challenge you to a game if you like. He wallows in what has been termed “perpetual adolescence” by those who don’t know any better, and enjoys a great book, a riveting movie, or a well-done video game just as much as the next guy. He prefers Apple computers and gadgets to anything else out there, and is an avid and voracious consumer of many things Internet, including other blogs and news about even more blogs and more technology.
You can find Ryan in many, many ways. Put his name in front of themarkelfamily.com and you’re sure to get an e-mail in the right place. Find him on AIM as “themarkel”, and find him on Xbox Live as “Achernar Dni“, and on PlayStation Network as “AchernarDni” (mostly because they don’t allow spaces in usernames there). He’s active in several online communities, including the wonderfully connected Quarter to Three for geek discussion. On Sunday mornings, you’ll find him at Trinity Lutheran Church, and the rest of the time, his location is a closely guarded secret.