Hello from almost always sunny Saratoga, California.
You want to know about me? Here's probably more than you want to know...
I enjoy learning things, creating things, spending time with friends, reading, and writing - to name a few pursuits. I'm on Facebook too often, and that's become my micro blog of choice. When I started this site in 1997 (check it out on the Internet Archive), the only way to get your ideas on the web was to have your own site. Things have certainly changed. I'm spread all over the web, but I try to connect my web presence through Shrimpware. This site is now more about long form thoughts - and an archive.
I think of myself as an explorer, a traveler, a sponge for information. Myers-Briggs pegs me as an ENFP, although on the tests that I've taken over the years that F/T score is almost 50/50. If you don't know about M-B, you should take the test. 50 dumb ass, stupid sounding questions that I almost randomly choose an answer to. Yet every time - every single time - I score the exact same. Wow, that is a powerful assessment tool. (As a test, I just did it again. The assessment tool was different, letting me score how I feel about certain situations. The result? ENFP again.)
I am lucky to be with Angela, a software engineer I met at a Christmas In April event many years ago. We did a lot of volunteer events with Community Impact. Angela retired in 2015 and I retired in 2016, now we can do whatever we want.
For me a great day starts with coffee and the NYTimes at a local coffee shop. I've lived many places. I'm most often in San Carlos and my butt is down at the Plantation Coffee Roaster every morning. We have a great group of friends who water there. The group stratifies by time of day and day of week. We are always there. When I'm in Saratoga, the Basin Cafe is my morning place of repose for 10 years (God, I miss the Blue Rock Shoot).
When I've exhausted the daily paper, who knows where I'll go. Sometimes I end up in a park with another good book. (Books I can recommend) I love Maker Nexus. It's a membership based maker space. The laser cutters are marvelous tools. The woodshop is better than any set up I will ever have. The ShopBot is amazing. I keep finding more things to do there. Sometimes I just go there and lounge around, like it was a club house.
I enjoy theater and good eating. I miss the San Jose Repertory theater. I dine out as often as my waistline allows (and often more often than that!).
I also enjoy cooking. I keep an online resource of my favorite, well tested, recipes. You'll find a few unusual and tasty recipes. The whole Modernist Cuisine bug took me by storm. I read the whole series of books and Harold McGee's tome (that took me several years!). It brought the scientific method to my kitchen madness. I am so impressed with the results I get from sous vide cooking. Over COVID I did a little bread making, after all, who didn't? In my typical dive-in fashion I read books and watched lectures. My favorite guy is Michael Kalanty. If you want to bake bread scientifically, get his books.
I like being useful and helping other people. Every other week I answer computer questions at the San Carlos Adult Community Center. I've helped get the Sequoia Village group off the ground technology-wise. I've done work on the Friends of the SCACC web site. If your non-profit needs some tech help, ask me! I used to be active with Tech Enhanced Life, PBC. They work to apply technology to the problems of aging. I've researched and written a number of articles there. I'm proud of my ones for older adults on the best pill reminder app and how to use Uber.
And I love doing anything with a group of friends or family. We often have friends over for drinks or games. The San Carlos Social Club is our own invention and we meet every six weeks or so for bottles of wine. We enjoy some of the modern games (Dominion, Splendor, Lost Cities, Scout are our current favorites).
If I'm not home, I like to be far away. I enjoy just about any traveling, as long as someone else plans it. Sometimes I write it up (old stuff here) with a few photos. I used to travel a lot for work and loved it. Instead of arriving on Monday for a meeting, I'd fly out Saturday and spend a few days seeing the place. The way airfares work it was cheaper over all and I'd be refreshed for the Monday customer meetings. Since retiring we've been able to drive to more places and spend longer times with people - this is great. I've had some great fishing adventures with my Canadian cousins at KC's Landing, Jon introduced me to Alaska at Raspberry Island, and even Pine Mountain Lake.
I have always enjoyed making things. I see software development as a creative endeavor to make something from nothing but an idea. But the hands. To hold something you've made in your hands is a special feeling. I became a member of a for-profit place and learned to use a lot of the tools. Then, just months after I retired the place went bankrupt. Bad management. Oh well. I went to the local shop to get a selfie; I expected big chains across the doors. Instead I found a couple of staff members standing there telling members who came in to use the place, "we're done." It was a sad day.
That evening a big group gathered at a local bar. There were lots of wild ideas to remake the place, get a donor, beg for money, etc, etc. But in that mass of crazy I found a few people who talked sensibly about wanting to do something to keep a makerspace in the community. I wasn't sure if we just wanted 10 people to share the expenses of a laser cutter or if we wanted to start something bigger. Six people met that Sunday in our dining room and Maker Nexus was born. It took us 18 months to put together an organization and location but the opening day was fantastic. People celebrated as a new community makerspace was born.
In the years since, Maker Nexus has moved once and now resides in a 30,000 square foot location with woodshop, metal shop, laser cutters, 3D printers, textiles, and more. We have an excellent staff of about 8 with over 40 instructors. We teach classes in how to use the tools so that anyone can join and start to make things to improve their lives. We teach 100 classes a month! In the summer of 2024 we taught over 500 kids in our summer camps. We have over 450 members. During COVID we made over 90,000 face shields and gave them away free to healthcare workers all over the US. I'm so proud of what we've done.
I'm no longer on the board of directors but I am a dedicated volunteer. I spend at least 10 hours a week on Maker Nexus work - infrastructure, communication, membership, organizational coaching. Essentially I pay to work there. My brother used to say that sounds like a cult. Then he joined his own local makerspace and does the same thing. Google "makerspace near me" and you can begin your own maker journey.
I thought I'd stay in school forever. Just a poor student learning anything anyone was willing to teach me. Then came my first real job in my field - an internship at IBM San Jose. I maintained low level disk drive diagnostics that ran on the IBM 370. Assembly code. Channel programs. BXLE. Reams of printout paper. Reading binary patch codes over the phone to field techs. I loved the job and THEY PAID ME! I was hooked. I went back to school on a mission to graduate ASAP. No more powdered Kraft mac n cheese for me!
I left school to work for the Hewlett Packard Company. 19 years later, almost to the day, I announced that I'd be leaving for a small start up of my own making. Vance and I started Audible Magic in 2000 and 24 years later it's still going. He was CEO and handled the business, I was VP of engineering and had to make it work. We made a great team (we still do).
Audible Magic was/is the acknowledged world wide leader in media recognition. Read all about Audible Magic on the corporate web site.
We were in the news many times, including the NY Times, LA Times, and the front page of The Wall Street Journal (Vance was one of those lithographic portraits!). Vance has testified before congress; met with the U.S. Attorney General; had our amicus brief accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court; I'm a named inventor on a bunch of U.S. and European patents. We won an Emmy. That's right, I've held that solid, heavy, golden trophy in my own two hands!
In 2016 the business was heading into another growth spurt, but I was 59 and tired. I retired from AM, and left the board a few years later. When we started we thought we'd be rich, rich, rich!!! Buy our own island! It didn't happen that way, but we paid ourselves a salary after the first few years so it didn't come out too bad. It was just the two of us when we started and when I left we had 50 employees. There were some tough times, but I loved it.
In my 19 years after college at HP I did so many things. I started in 3rd level technical support; we only took the calls that two other levels of engineers had been unable to resolve. Mostly they were tough, low level bugs in the software. It was fun ferreting them out. Then I moved into management. I managed these 3rd level support teams, sometimes starting them from scratch. I had a lot of fun creating and leading the System Performance Consulting team. We built up a team of experts in wringing every last drop of performance out of the HP3000. We tuned customer applications, we tuned the operating system, we routinely worked with the kernel lab to change the way the system worked. I also managed 50 engineers in one of the MPE development labs. My teams had the powerful, but waning, Allbase, and we added ODBC to Image/SQL, thus bringing it into the future. And my system test and integration team went through a complete revolution from doing standard nothings into a team that found problems early in the development cycle and kept a software release on schedule. Someday I'll have to write up a few stories from those days.
My last job at HP was managing the knowledge engineering program for the software support services division. I had a team that improved the content in the knowledge base of 4M docs (way too many) and a team that looked to understand and plan for strategic needs of the businesses. We were successful in improving the usefulness of our content by coupling analytical analysis of keywords in our content with pattern based analysis of our users' behavior. It sounds dull, but it was pretty exciting to me. I also was program manager of the HP Electronic Support Center. It became a great place for business HP-UX and NT customers to get support via the web.
At one point my teams were as large as 50 engineers and $7M a year in expenses. In the hay days we took the whole team to three day offsites at Pajaro Dunes, rented the entire Monterey Bay Aquarium, and had a memorable staff retreat that included dinner at The French Laundry.
If I go back to the beginning, I never wanted to leave school. I took so many classes that were way outside my major. Lots of chem, physics, geology, psychology, and even a few in the business school. I just wanted to learn everything.
Then I look back at my career (so far) and see that I didn't stop learning. HP was like grad school for business. The company invested in me, but I took advantage of every opportunity. I remember talking with our controller many times about how the financials were run. I talked with friends in HR about what worked and what didn't. I spent a lot of time with my MBA friends learning about personal finance and investing. I learned tons from the engineers who worked for me. And I learned from our customers.
Audible Magic challenged me like a master class in running an entire business. In a start up you really have to do it all, and there is no one to ask for help - you just have to figure it out. Growing a business is tough all around. Fun, but really tough. I got to apply all that I learned at HP, but also had to make up a lot more. At HP our division could have a bad quarter and rely on the rest of the company to carry us. At AM, we had to make it work every quarter.
When Maker Nexus flickered to life I saw a chance to put all of my learning to work. Organizational design, financial management, marketing, hiring, executive coaching, documentation, training. And I still had things to learn. Non-profits are a different beast; I took a three day boot camp on non-profit management. I had to learn to find commercial real estate!
In retropect I never did leave school. I'm still learning things today. LoRa, Arduino, the science of cooking. AI, machine learning, and the science of aging. I am so grateful for the opportunities I've had. I hope I've been able to give back to my employees, my friends, and my community. The game is not over yet, and I have a lot more playing to do. (I still want to get an IMDB entry and a Wikipedia page!)
Email me ... and say hello.