I was born in Boise, Idaho, on September 24, 1958, though my parents lived in Portland, Oregon briefly while mom was carrying me and dad went to Diesel Mechanic School here. Not long after, we moved to Cascade, Idaho, and then to McCall, Idaho. We lived in various places in the area (about 60-100 miles north of Boise) where dad drove a log truck, until February, 1966 when dad got a job hauling wood chips for Boise Cascade in Eastern Washington. McCall is where I learned to love trees, mountains, swimming and snow.
We moved to Wilbur (about 60 miles west of Spokane), and lived there until 1971. I hated it - a vast flat wasteland of wheat fields and sagebrush. I'd just started learning to ski in McCall, and there was no place reasonably close to do it in Wilbur, so had to give it up.
In 1971, dad transferred to La Grande, Oregon. There were actually trees there, and mountains, and sometimes snow. When I graduated high school in 1976, I stayed in town and went to Eastern Oregon State College, studying Physics, with the intention of transferring to Oregon State University after three years, for another two years of Electrical Engineering, ending up with a double degree (this was a special program setup between the two schools). In the middle of the third year, Diffy Q's and a teacher I could hardly understand proved the straw, and I dropped out of the program.
I still transferred to OSU for the next year, but went into their Computer Science program instead. Of course, the final irony is that one of the required classes there was Difference Equations, basically discrete versions of Differential Equations. I think I had to take it twice before I finally squeaked through it. I worked at the OSU Computer Center (programming in COBOL(!)) to help pay for it all, and enjoyed the academic environment, but alas, they had all they needed and didn't need me, so off it was to a variety of endeavors, until in 1984...
...someone I'd worked with at the OSU Computer Center called and asked if I wanted to come work for Intel. As the most recent endeavor hadn't fared too well, I was all for it, and moved to Portland in April, 1984. I hated segments, but well, food is food, and it was finally a chance to work in the guts of things instead of COBOL and applications.
Shortly after starting there, I was able to put together a small Unix system at home and opened it up for a few friends to dial into for email and USENET news. It grew and grew over the years and is still in operation (see below).
In the summer of 1998, I finally acted on an interest in moviemaking, having made one in high school for a class project, and took some classes on the subject at the Northwest Film Center. There's more on that in the Activities->Moviemaking link at the left.
In 1999, I broke down and bought my own house.
In late 1999, my group spun out of Intel to form PassEdge, a startup developing Digital Rights Management technology. We got bought by Intertrust in late 2000, and they had a layoff every quarter after. I survived the first one, but not the second, in August 2001. The entire Portland office was shutdown in early 2002. I took a short sabbatical and worked on some projects on my house, and moved agora out of the house I had rented before buying this one. I've added DSL support and am currently working on an advertising campaign to increase business to the point where it will be able to support me indefinitely.