Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee... -- no wait, Bourne in a Unix shell... --- or was that Bjarne in a virtual class? My earliest influence was probably listening to Doodles Weaver singing with the Olde Maestro Spike Jones - life has been on a sideways slide since then.

Actually, I lived in Southern California up to the age of ten, and spent the rest of my formative years in rural Sacramento County, culminating with a B.A. in music from the local state college - came in studying string bass and orchestration, left as their first graduate in electronic composition - those were the days when you had to do a bit of soldering to create synthetic musique. After a few years of madly plugging in patch cords, I decided that computers would be a better tool for composition and performance than the manual way. I eventually bought an Altair 8800 kit, and after a few months of burning my fingers with the soldering iron, actually got it running (every New Year I tell myself this is the year I won't burn my fingers, but somehow that old soldering iron keeps itself busy).

Next step was writing systems software for micros, then a few apps - went to work for MicroPro and had my fingers in WordStar for a while, living on the North Coast. Next came a call to work in the Sunny Caribbean where I did work on and off for the next three years, computerizing the Social Security system of St. Kitts, putting a newspaper on line, and helping run a regional computer training institute. I also worked for a company in the far south end of Silicon Valley that builds robotics semiconductor fabrication equipment - they wanted to go into automation in a big way, so I created a software development department and had fun while trying to stay out of bunny suits.

Moved up to Tahoe in 1989 to write a visual debugger for a Fortran vendor, have lately been doing contract work and surfing the net, and am currently running a few websites. Nice up here at the lake - unfortunately, northern Nevada isn't exactly a hot spot in the world of software, so I tried to do what I could out of my home office when not out on the road.

I've been involved with the web/new media scene in San Francisco since the mid-nineties, and finally got a house and moved my family down there for good - or until the dotcom bubble burst. Our most recent move has been to Shingle Springs, in the Sierra Foothills between Sacramento and Placerville. We have some acerage so we can get back into organic farming and give our dogs and birds some elbow room. We are blessed with beautiful and peaceful country, nice neighbors, great schools, and even have broadband. I live up here with my lovely wife Cindy, and our sons Isaiah and Ezra.

Other passions include cooking (I consider chicken fried steak the yardstick of a good chef, although Asian and Mexican cuisine are the house favorites) and music. I've played in all sorts of groups from symphony orchestras to garage bands to sleazy country bars, and must a dmit I like it all. I was also fortunate enough to come into radio in the late sixties, and spent a few years as an announcer and producer at one of the early "underground" stations. Favorites include (in no particular order) JS Bach, Mahler, Mothers, the Dead, Bob Marley, the Beach Boys, Brahms, Tito Puente, Charles Ives, Frank Loesser, Merle Haggard, Dick Dale, the Bonzos, and of course Maestro Jones. If you want some current recommendations for music I'll try to help.