Sui and I goofing around at home, around late October 2009:
Here I am at Bandelier National Monument near Los Alamos, New Mexico, taken during our vacation in March 2008. We tend to go to NM every other year to stay with friends and explore. New Mexico is very different from our home in New Jersey!
Here is a picture of my wife Sui (Sue) up in one of the cave doors that the Indians used as shelter...
And here are the two silly kids, Megan and Jason. Who put the camera in low-res mode?
Some of the neat things I've done so far (but I'm not done yet)...
- Became a ham radio operator at age 11.
- I got my first personal computer in 1978, long before most people even new what they were. My first was a KIM-1.
- My first letter was published in the 1979 issue of "MICRO - The 6502 Journal" and was about porting the Tiny Pilot language to a KIM-1 microcomputer.
- My first paid article was in Micro, August 1980, entitled "Additions to Tiny Pilot". Not bad for a 17 year old high school kid!
- Met famous card counter Ken Uston when I was 19 and was hired to write a program to teach his card counting techniques. Ken contacted me a few years later about working with him on a book about Pac-Man but turned it down. The book sold many copies... d'oh!
- As a result of knowing Mr Uston, I was considered a card counter and was asked not to play blackjack in several casinos.
- Franklin Computer offered me a job as a Software Engineer at age 19. I can get paid for doing fun stuff?
- I had a visit from the FBI once because they raided a phone phreak's apartment and found a list of bulletin board numbers. The jerk listed mine as "The Pirate Shop" but the real name was "The Penguin Shop". When I asked the FBI agent if I needed a lawyer, he said "sometimes we just want to be your friend." I was never contacted again by my "friends."
- By the time I was 21, I had been published a number of times in various trade magazines.
- I turned down a job offer at Microsoft following an 8 hour interview. It was my only interview that involved a discussion with a psychiatrist. They offered a job that wasn't in the department I wanted, but it probably was a good offer.
- Dated and eventually married co-worker. We now have two great kids!
- Met Steve Circia when he was one of the coolest guys in computing (early 80s). I bumped into him at the Boston Embedded Systems Conference in 2004 and he remembered the meeting and said something like “you were the kid sitting at the end of the table, right?”
- Went up the channel 52 tower in "Baker's Basin" next to Route 1. It is 1052 feet, or so I'm told.
- Attended several memorial services for Emilio Carranza at the Carranza memorial on Carranza Road in Tabernacle, NJ.
- Once wrote a sentence with "Carranza" appearing three times. Again, not many people can claim this.
- Have held a number of cool titles, including General Manager of an ISP, VP of Software Engineering for a start-up and Lead Member of Technical Staff.
- Built and ran a successful consulting company in the 1990s.
- Built and ran an ISP in the mid 90s before most people were on the internet.
- Have been on the internet since 1986, and have had the same email address since 1994.
- Have explored parts of New Mexico, including Chacos Canyon, the pretroglyphs outside Albuquerque, the Acoma pueblo, Bandelier, etc. My wife and I collect Acoma pottery.
- Served on the Conference Advisory Board for the ATCA Summit and MicroTCA Summit trade shows.
- Met and become friends with Dr. Lance Leventhal. Yup, the same guy who wrote all those computer books in the 70s and 80s.
- Have been to Germany several times for business.
- Drove a rented Mercedes on the Autobahn but never exceeded 150 KPH (about 93 MPH). My BMW handles better.
- Was invited to speak at the ATCA workshop preceding the IEEE 17th Real Time Conference in Portugal, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to make it.
- Finally gave up waiting for an iPhone on Verizon, so my wife and I forced Apple’s hand and bought two Droids. Apple will see the error of their ways any day now and work something out with Verizon. In the mean time we both carry a Droid AND an iPod touch.
- Currently serving on the PICMG ATCA for Physics software working group.
- I was one of many participants in a very funny discussion at Ironic Sans titled “They Don’t Make Computer Manuals Like They Used To.”
- Was interviewed on RetroMacCast! Look for episode 154, “The Applegate Tapes.” This was a lot of fun, and very unexpected.
Current Projects (as time permits)...
- Building an Arduino shield to control electroluminescent (sp?) lighting.
- Building another Arduino shield to control antenna relays.
- Bringing up a CP/M BIOS for my S-100 computer. Egads... old tech!
- Slowly writing a CFFA driver for the Franklin CP/M card.