I was born and reared in Houston, Texas. I went to a suburban high school and proceeded on to an agricultural and mechanical college, where I studied math. I then went to work for a military contractor that produced aircraft and missile systems, where I gained diverse technical expertise. My next step was to the great southwest (for those who don't know, Texas is a bit of a hybrid between southwest culture and deep south culture) to spend a little time at a scientific think tank in an attempt to force some fusion between this random technical expertise and my world-view. The independence of the place opened whole new opportunities for bringing together the often disparate efforts of work-life, home-life, and meaningful-life. At that point, I started a company with 2 other guys.... which, after 3 and a half or 4 years died an agonizing and slow death. At this point, the whole dot-com thing had gotten a bit out of control. Articles in pop magazines like Wired and Business Week were telling about the wonderful new world we should expect because the Third Wave was about to break. So, I figured I'd move out to mid-coast California and get some experience with these flat technologies that were supposedly going to change the world. I then went to work for a dot-com whose mission was to create an online healthcare marketplace. I'd never had any direct experience with mass delusion before... and though I never quite bought the "vision", I thought to myself "These seem like pretty smart people and the management claim to get signals from the Dog Star...So, what the heck." Anyway, I learned alot about database-backed websites and the various technologies used to instantiate them. More importantly, I learned what it must have been like in Jonestown in the late '70s. My ability to time-slice my technical duties with my role as a diplomat blossomed. I then took this finely tuned skill set and went to work for what I thought was a rehabilitated dot-com, Icarian. We were doing pretty well until the recession and the 9/11 events. But, the state of the world boded ill for us. Still, we were bought by a company called Workstream, whose management techniques I don't much respect; though I wish them luck. I was laid off with all the other "fluff" there at Icarian. So, now I'm off on my own again with my new company. My intentions are to bootstrap TD up the old fashioned way, with blood, sweat, and tears. I'm just a bit tired of all the hype I've seen in the past 2 or 3 years. But, I fully expect to replay Sisyphus' drama and end up back at the drawing board, again. After all, that's what this life is about, eh? We're perilously close to losing the boulder again because of the ridiculous cost of living in CA. So, we're moving to a town just outside of Portland, OR. Rental property is ~42% cheaper... 42% cheaper! I know CA is nice and all; but, come on! The Santa Cruz mountains are like one HUGE anthill... with people dug in everywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if God came down and swiped off the top, and a bunch of people came swarming out to crawl up God's leg and begin biting him. During the first big rain every fall, you can literally SEE the polution flowing down the streams and along the sides of the road... human runoff. It's pretty sickening. I'm sure it's more crowded in Bombay, Shanghai, New York, and London; but, how these people live so close to each other is way beyond this agoraphilic boy from Texas. So, off we go to live in a state full of salmon, dairy, desert, and rocky coast.... but most of all, with a population density of 36 ppl/sq.mi. (as opposed to CA's 221 -- and that's with all that freaking desert running down the right-hand side of it!).
Founder
Director of Systems Engineering
Software Architect
Director of Tech Strategy
Engineering Manager
Founder
Everything from taking out the trash to executing contracts.
Research Technician
Maintaining a complex systems simulation toolkit called Swarm.
Operations Analysis Engineer
Everything from assembly coding to lethality assessment.
