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Man's Success Recipe Tech Know-How and Faith

Cheryl Bentley/SUNCOAST NEWS

Randall Nagy looks at three of his Web pages at his New Port Richey home. Spituality, recipes, puzzle solving, and feel-good quotations are among the Nagy interests that appear on his Web sites.

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By Cheryl  Bentley | The Suncoast News

Published: May 20, 2008

Astrology bugs Randall Nagy.

"I don't know how the zodiac can be so accurate," he said while sitting beside the pool in his New Port Richey home. "It annoys me."

Annoying though it may be, you can be sure Nagy knows something about it.

A man whose fascination with life appears unlimited would have, of course, run across astrology. Nagy also collects recipes and quotations, writes software for fun, creates Japanese sudoku logic puzzles, pursues his relationship to God and manages to bring it all together through technology.

He describes Sagittarius, Nagy's own zodiac sign: "Extroverted, honest, impetuous. Going only where an idiot would go." It's that self-deprecating humor that livens up his often highly technical vocabulary and makes Nagy fun to be with.

A conversation with the trainer for the Canadian-based firm Web Age Solutions jumps from technology, to the spiritual, to food, to philosophy. Nagy is interested in all of them, and has found a way to bring them to the Web.

Take the spiritual. One of his Web sites, saintbook.org, has a link to his book "An Interview with a Saint." The book is a fictional account based on the real-life spiritual teachers in Nagy's life at a time, he says, when "I was trying to figure out what was missing."

He calls himself a charismatic. "That means I take things on the fly and let God direct me where he wants."

"Saint" is also available at www.amazon.com, but he has sold only three copes, he confesses in typically guileless Nagy style, one to a friend and two to his mother.

That's OK, he notes. "How can you put a price tag on your life's work?"

The Saintbook site also has access to his book, "Mighty Maxims," a book of quotations. "It's nothing but good quotes, good intentions because that's what helps me," he says. He has more than 70,000 and has collected them for 30 years.

Nagy also writes sudoku for the site. The Japanese puzzle is a grid with nine squares in each row and column. Some numbers are already in the squares. The object is to fill each column and row with a number from 1 to 9 using each number only once.

This student of spirituality also delights in the physical world. His hobby of collecting camp recipes that began when he was a Boy Scout growing up in Texas morphed into a partnership with a Canadian woman, Cathie Leslie.

Leslie contributed the recipes she had inherited from a long line of family cooks and those she had picked up from estate sales the past 30 years. Nagy has put more than 750,000 of them into electronic form and chooses one of them daily for the recipe of the day on the Saintbook Web site.

On his cookpedia.com site, members of a free cookbook club get both daily recipes and a monthly electronic cookbook. The site also sells the cookbook management software Nagy creates.

Ever aware of his spiritual path, Nagy wants to give back. He has recently formed an agreement with the Palm Harbor-based Suncoast Animal League under which he will give any donations to that organization people want to give after Nagy repairs their computers for free. He is working with that organization of set up a monthly schedule for computer repair.

All his activities add a positive note to the world, and that makes him feel good, Nagy says. "I'm trying to have a wonderful super glow around me."

Cheryl Bentley can be reached at 727-815-1069 or cbentley@suncoastnews.com.

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