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.
Here’s a few pictures of me over the years:
The first picture of me with my mom on day 1 at the old Freeman’s Hospital in Joplin, MO.My grandmother on my mom’s side and me. I always called her ’nanny’. The story is I had a speech impediment and couldn’t pronounce hard ‘G’ sounds so ‘granny’ came out as ’nanny’.Fishing at Stockton Lake, Missouri.A Saturn V at the Alabama Space & Rocket Center.My first computer: an Apple IIe.A Polaroid from a creative-writing class in high school.High-school career day with some friends. I wish this was color; that shiny polyester maroon jacket I’m wearing was awesome.High-school career day recreation with the same friends a few years later. 2023Escaping high school.I was lucky to have some cool cars. This is a 1982 Mustang GT with a few mods.After the Mustang was totaled by someone veering out of their lane and hitting me head-on I got this ‘71 4-speed Chevelle SS.Working as a cave guide during summer break in college.At Notre-Dame de Paris in 1993.Rock climbing at Donner Pass.On Alta Peak in Sequoia National Park.An weekend outting to Yosemite with Autodesk friends. The fellow on the left later became Autodesk Co-CEO.My office in AutoCAD Product Support at Autodesk, Sausalito (1991).Office in the Unix Ports & Platforms group (1995).Office in the GIS group (1997).Autodesk Leadership Training off-site (1998).A picture of my parents at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco doing their best impression of ‘American Gothic’ sometime in the mid-90’s.Picture of me in front of a Frisco train at Silver Dollar City sometime in the mid-90’s.Doing the ‘Van Life’ thing in 2005 before it was trendy.My first real motorcycle, a Harley-Davidson Nightster.One of my first dates with Julie at a corn maze near Salem, Oregon.Getting married a year later.After the Harley I got a Buell Ulysses XB12X Sport Touring bike. I went all over Oregon on this one, from the coast to the desert.Me and my 2002 Jeep on the the Alvord Playa east of Steens Mountin in Eastern Oregon.Product Day at Rackspace—handing out cotton candy.A typical day at Rackspace Austin.We got a VIP tour of the Very Large Array (VLA) radio astronomy observatory in New Mexico a few years back. This is where the movies 2010 and Contact were filmed.I drove out to California from Texas and bought this Honda from my good friend Kevin.I put on some new tires, a new clutch and added a few accessories like the foot boards and the bags. This was a great bike. More power and less vibration than a big twin Harley, watercooled so it was more comfortable in the hot Texas climate, and shaft drive with no chain or belt worries. And painted in UT Orange so everyone in Austin loved it.I drove this bike all over Texas from hill country to Marfa. It’s only negative was limited fuel capacity; sometimes I needed to take along extra like during this trip to McDonald Observatory.Showing my dad pictures on my laptop shortly before he passed away in 2013.A server rack for a large ad network Aerospike cluster located [redacted] an AWS facility in Ashburn, VA.I’m holding a comically large 208-volt 3-phase power plug for a datacenter power distribution unit (PDU). Each rack has two of these and a typical modern datacenter has thousands of racks. So when they say datacenters require a lot of power: yeah, they really do.Ada hanging out in the RV with me while I’m working.Our family farm outside Kansas City.Ada, the farm dog.Ada, in the back of our diesel Gator.Family get together at the farm for Christmas 2023.I got this cool custom Magic: The Gathering card for being on the team that on-boarded D&D Beyond during their aquistion by Hasbro.My good friend Dr. Parker and me. We’ve known each other since grade school in Joplin, MO.My home when I’m in Seattle, across the street from SeaTac airport.
