I was born in the Bay Area of California in the early sixties, went to high school in Glen Ridge, NJ, then went to Wesleyan University in CT. After a couple years in Boston and many in San Francisco, I now live in Portland, Oregon.
My main interests include software, study of the mind and brain, economics & sustainability, modern music, literature.
My recent blogging efforts center around Mind in Mind which is about neuroscience and scientific understanding of the mind (which I see as hosted by, but not the same as, the brain).
I also have a blog called Mediated,
and it concentrated on words, sounds and images.
I worked in several product management roles supporting a SaaS/cloud application roll-out, asset management, and integrated smart grid operations for Oracle Energy and Water (Utilities), a global business unit devoted to utility companies.
When not doing work on Oracle Utility systems, I've been doing some self-study on web tools. My main project is called List-O-Rama, a list keeping app (for ToDo's, birthday lists, etc.). Uses php & mysql on the back, javascript/jquery/bootstrap on the client side, with a JSON-based ajax approach. Also did a little study of the graph database Neo4j, including a stab at establishing a simple meta-data model.
Portland State University offers a number of graduate courses focused on sustainability, and I took several toward the Graduate Certificate that delve into this still emerging field. Harder to really get a handle on than you might think - in part because anything which is not sustainable is (by definition) not going to last. But then again almost everything changes, so what does truly last?
For many years I worked for a software company that was called SPL WorldGroup Inc. based in San Francisco which evolved into a software vendor to the global utilities (electricity, gas, water). We built several iterations of a large database application to handle customer care and billing. I got the opportunity to take on many job roles from coding to implementing to market strategy, and was able to visit much of the US and five other continents. In Nov. 2006 the company was sold to Oracle.
Went to business school full time at UC Berkeley, received an MBA in June 1993.
When I first got to San Francisco in 1988, I looked up Vale at RE/Search, whom I had corresponded with after reading the Pranks book. Over the next several years I helped on a number of projects, most notably Modern Primitives and the reprint of J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition.
For a year or so I took a number of classes in the emerging field of computer graphics. You can see some of the work here.