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 economics & sustainability, modern music, literature, web and internet trends.
Portland State University offers a number of graduate courses focused on sustainability, and I've been delving into this emerging field.
For many years I worked for a software company that was called SPL WorldGroup Inc. (in Nov. 2006 the company was sold to Oracle) based in San Francisco which evolved into a vendor to the global utilities (electricity, gas, water, that type of thing). I got the opportunity to try many job roles from coding to implementing to market strategy, and was able to visit much of the US and five other continents. I still do some consulting for the company.
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 reprints of The Atrocity Exhibition and The Torture Garden.
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.
Back in the 1950s, Thomas Pynchon went to Cornell, and was friends with Richard Farina (he dedicated Gravity's Rainbow to Farina). Well Richard Farina was married to Mimi Farina, who is the sister of Joan Baez. Of course Joan Baez was romantically entwined with Bob Dylan back about 1964. David Hajdu's book Positively 4th Street ties this all together.
Going back to Pynchon, his agent for many years was a woman named Candida Donadio (died in 2001), who also worked with Nelson Algren, Joseph Heller, William Gaddis and many others.