About

Me
At my oldest son’s wedding in Oregon.

I’ve been a technology and science geek my whole life. Watching Star Trek as a kid had a huge influence on me.

I was a member of a small-town science fiction club and one of the members brought to a meeting a new gadget in 1978: A Commodore PET personal computer. It was amazing.

A few years later in high school they got several Apple II+ computers and I was in one of the very first programming classes learning how to program these things in BASIC. I was hooked.

Luckily my parents saw the potential of these new gadgets and were able to buy me my very own Apple II with an 80-column card, a floppy drive, and an Epson MX-80 dot-matrix printer. To say this was life-changing would be an understatement.

My parents were middle-class and back then a personal computer was an extravagant expense. I’m very grateful they saw the value and were able to make it happen.

For the rest of high school and through college I had the Apple and leveraged it and my programming skills to help learn all kinds of things. I wrote a program to graph math functions and do calculus. I wrote a simple CAD program to do technical drawings and learned basic I/O programming using a joystick for input.

After college I sold the computer and it was still worth enough to finance my move to California to see how far I could take this computer thing.

That worked out nicely.

Here’s a few pictures over the years:

IMG 1191
The first picture of me and my mom on day 1.
Fishing
Fishing at Stockton Lake, Missouri.
Saturn5
Visiting the Alabama Space and Rocket Center during a very memorable summer vacation.
Creative writing class
A polaroid taken during a high school creative writing class.
Some friends and I at high school career day.
20230722 160615
Update to the above; same friends, 40 years later.
First apple
My first computer; an Apple IIe.
One summer during college working as a cave guide.
Autodesk1
A few years later in AutoCAD product support at Autodesk in Sausalito.
Paris
Notre-Dame de Paris in 1993.
Autodesk2
Another office at Autodesk when I was in the ports and platforms group.
Sierra peak
On Alta Peak in Sequoia National Park.
IMG 1195
Yet another office at Autodesk when I was in the GIS group around 1997.

My group at an Autodesk Leadership Training offsite in 1998:

Wife1
One of my first dates with Julie at a corn maze outside Salem, Oregon.
Wife2
Getting married a year later in 2008.
Rackspace
Product day at Rackspace handing out cotton candy.
Rackspace2
A typical day at Rackspace Austin.
Dad
Showing my dad some pictures shortly before he passed away in 2013.
Farm
Our ranch in rural Missouri outside Kansas City.