Hello, World

Hello, World.

My purpose today is to start a blog to tell the world who I am, in a way. Here is a brief autobiography.

Born in the early 60's in Pennsylvania.

Lived with family in New Jersey, Michigan, and Indiana through high school.
Favorite beaches: Bethany Beach, Delaware and Atlantic City, New Jersey.

At age 6 and 7 behind our back yard we had a ditch and beyond the ditch was the school yard which was good for kites, swings, and a very big 15 foot hill where my bike speedometer could get up to 20 MPH! This was part of the Indianapolis Public School system for grades 1 and 2. (On the swings: I'm Mario Andretti! I'm A.J. Foyt!)

From third grade I remember a Rambler station wagon and a VW bus, field trips to DC and Chicago, riding a pony, minor bonfires, chess, and poker. There was a card game called Rook and a logic game called Wff-n-proof (well formed logical formulas with dice!) that I didn't grasp til much later.

Fourth through Eighth was a private grade school with decent academics and some good teachers but my social integration was fairly unsuccessful and I have a bad feeling when I remember it. During this time my parents split up.

High school career featured some math contests, physics lessons, computer programming, french, chem, phsyics, having a pizza-face, chess teams ... I actually went to two different high schools, ditching the colorful frightening downtown school after freshman year in favor of the impersonal huge one with better credentials. That was a 3 year high school mostly composed of people from 3 feeder high schools. So I mostly didn't know anybody in high school either.

My family went to Unitarian Universalist fellowship meetings in Indianapolis. This was an informal kind of group with lots of interesting people. Some of my romances came from there. This was a rich experience with a variety of exposure to Indiana parks, museums, speakers, visiting other churches, farms, etc. and I feel grateful for this!

For college I was at Penn, which is the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. My major field was Mathematics, minor field Psychology, and some programming classes, and some random other things. My extracurricular was mainly the Ultimate Disc team and I could run like the wind! The team was called The Void and had some incredible throwers and jumpers on it. My favorite class was Math 370-371, Algebra, with Dr. Shatz, where I learned about linear algebra, group theory, ring theory etc. with the greatest Math Study Group ever.

My transportation all this time was mostly bicycle.

This brings us up to the early 80's.

I decided it would be a fun adventure to join the Peace Corps and I managed to get in to the Peace Corps for a 2 year job teaching high school math in Botswana. It was an adventure for sure. I remember Larry Keyes from Maun Secondary had a poster on his door that said: Life is a daring adventure ... or nothing. with a man on a surfboard. There was a wise woman connected with the training named Aunt Busi and her judgement of me was that I was a tourist. Maun is a town for tourists, in some people's eyes! The Peace Corps issued me a bicycle there too but it didn't do too well in the sand.

The culture shock on returning to Indianapolis was great as I lost a lot of status and connection to Maun and the people there. My mother comforted me and let me watch cable TV in her condo (having sold the house!) with her new husband for nearly a week before insisting I should stand on my own feet and get a job and an apartment! I found a job at Boehringer-Mannheim Diagnostics through a contact, Bruce Shuman, for 22K I think, Scientific Programmer I. Under the direction of project manager and physicist Richard Pemper I wrote a Fortran program to compute calibration numbers for vials of glucose meter test strips. I lived in apartments on Talbot Street and bought my first car, a used Mazda for $2000.

I felt at Beohringer-Mannheim I was failing to gain any kind of solid footing. I thought of applying to grad school. Based on small bits of information I applied to Georgia Tech graduate math school saying I was interested in chaos theory, computing, modeling the atmosphere, ... and around September 1989 I went there for orientation, and started taking classes. The mathematics department provided me with research assistantships and teaching assistantships. After some difficulties, I finished my dissertation in 1997. One of my diversions during this time was playing chess on the internet.

I wrote a Java applet to do Rubik's cube and it got me into one programming job although that was short-lived. Quicktime would be better for displaying a snowboard - the palette of colors in the Java applet was much too small to do shading well. Also I knew I was not up to creating a new database engine to compete with Microsoft Sql-Server.

Rather than stay broke in academia, not ready or willing to face the rigors of a postdoc and trying to get tenure, I found a programming job at a small company called Knowledge Networks in Atlanta. I worked hard there building a site on flaky platforms for online training systems. The company changed its name to Learn.Net. Under a series of ambitious managers I clung to that job like it was a life raft until late 2005 when I was eventually too burned out and too highly paid so the company let me go with a decent severance package.

In 2003 I went through a training program, a men's weekend, the New Warrior Training Adventure done by the Mankind Project of Georgia. I have been involved with an I Group, their Lodge Keepers Society, and been on staff for three trainings. I've found great personal growth through this organization. I can say that they've saved my life.

Around the same time I discovered internet scrabble and started playing in scrabble clubs and tournaments.

Since leaving Learn.Net I have been on vacation, healing from all the chaotic history I have been through, enjoying relaxing, discovering my creative side, getting organized, and planning for the future. I now plan to move to Austin, TX to live with a sweet and wonderful female, and look for some kind of work in Austin.

I have a brother who lives in Michigan. My parents live in Indianapolis. I have also been in touch with my mother's family and my father's family to a lesser degree.