About me

It was 1985. On a fold-out card table, a worn copy of COMPUTE! magazine lay propped open with toy Tauntauns acting as paperweights. My tiny fingers had just finished transcribing the code for Mindbusters into GW-BASIC on the bulky desktop PC. I typed “RUN” and hit Enter. There was a pause as the code compiled. The floppy drive chugged a few times. And then…

SYNTAX ERROR ON 80

Line 80! What was on line 80? … A poke command. I didn’t know how to debug a poke command!

But the real reason for the error was revealed at the top of the code block…

Program 2: Mindbusters For VIC-20

I spent who knows how long finger-pecking the code for a VIC-20 program into my IBM PC! They weren’t compatible. I’d have to start all over.

It was time to take a break and see if anything was on TV. I turned the volume knob on our console TV until it clicked. William Shatner’s voice came out of the speakers before the tube had time to warm up.

Childhood

I was born in the 70s, but I don’t remember them. I grew up on a cherry orchard and spent equal time outside and in front of a screen. When I wasn’t climbing trees or eating cherries, I was sitting in front of the TV or our computer. Cartoons and sci-fi were my preferred choices on the boob tube.

We were one of the only households I knew with a computer, and we had one since before I could remember. I started programming when I was 7 years old; it was practically a necessity if I wanted to play video games when someone was already playing the Intellivision. I spent a lot of time typing programs from magazines and books into whatever flavor of BASIC happened to be on the 5 and a quarter floppy.

Early Internet

I first got online in 1990 by connecting to the local college’s VAX/VMS system at 300 baud to access Telnet, Usenet, and Gopher—which I used to download Monty Python scripts and Steven Wright jokes and to play BBS games with people around the world.

When I first got access to the web, it was through the LYNX text-only browser. We occasionally signed up for Prodigy, CompuServe, AOL to see webpages with pictures when they were offering a free month (but they only allowed 20 to 30 hours online), then cancelled the membership before they charged my parents’ credit card.

Professional Life

Programming was my destiny, I thought. I was a software developer until 2007 when I realized that I hated programming for other people. The fastest way to kill your love for something is to do it for money.

Nowadays, I’m a Product Manager for socially responsible companies. It’s something I’m good at, and at companies where I feel like we’re making the world just a tiny bit better.

Hobbies

In business, it’s important to focus on target customers, not myself; to build features people will pay for, not features I want to build; and to always stay on brand, not to be my random, ADHD self. I understand, and am good at setting aside part of myself for the business I work for. But it’s important to unplug and do things for yourself.

My favorite hobby is learning new hobbies. Painting, sculpting, kombucha making, poetry writing, stained glass, linocut printing, bamboo flute making. Every 6 to 9 months a compulsion comes over me and I have to learn something new. These hobbies would often become side gigs, but like I said, the fastest way to kill your love for something is to do it for money.

This Website

This site is a half-hearted, pressure-free attempt to recapture some of my excitement when the net was new and full of hope. It’s a place to put all the random, off-brand projects I work on and rarely complete. And if I want, this site is something I’ll eventually abandon like many of my other projects.

By the way, I still have the console TV. It’s designed like a wooden dry sink; the doors that used to hide the TV screen have hand-painted designs. It stopped working years ago. The electronics were pulled out and shelves put in. We store our kids’ craft stuff in it.