When I Was Born I was born at a very early age: Monday, 14 September 1970. (I don't really remember it all that well.) Where I Live Celebration, Florida, the 'new urbanism' town built on Disney property. Otherwise known as 'Pleasantville,' 'Stepford,' or 'that place in The Truman Show.' Where I Went to School Princeton University, class of 1992, BSE degree in Computer Science. I graduated from Malvern Prep high school in 1988, and my grade school was Briarglen Elementary. The Stanford Computer Science Summer Camp was a brief but important part of my education. My Keirsey Temperament Rating ENFP (Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving). My Philosophy That was Zen; this is Tao. It all depends on your philosophy. Words to Live By Proverbs, for what they're worth.

Fantastic! Incredible! Marvelous! Amazing! Astounding! Extraordinary! Magnificent! Splendid!

- Roget's Thesaurus

MY CAREER

I was employee #163 at Netscape Communications Corporation from April 1995 (before the company went public) to November 1999. I maintained the Tech Support web server, fed and cared for My Netscape, managed all of the email autoreplies for the company, and was variously involved in everything from IS duties to customer service to webmastering to site design to system administration to whatever nobody else handled. I made things go. My job title was "Netscapegoat". My posts to the internal newsgroup mcom.bad-attitude were part of the material subpoenaed by Microsoft at one point as they were building their "case" against the government. I left after AOL's takeover ruined the company, but I have enough stock to keep me from complaining too much. Words for a hacker to live by: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. - Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of the Four

After that, I worked at Apple Computer, Inc., as a system administrator and production environment manager on the iTools project (now .Mac). I was responsible for getting the production applications to run on the production servers. I decided that working twenty-hour days and carrying a pager 24x7 just wasn't working for me, so I did a lot of soul-searching to figure out what I wanted in life. Here's the short list I ended up with, in order: I want a house to spread out in. I'm tired of living in apartments. I want to find a wonderful woman, with light in her heart, to spend my life with. I want to find a job that makes me eager to get out of bed in the mornings. I realized that my job wasn't bringing me any closer to any of these goals, so I quit so I can focus on pointing my life in the right direction. I'm keeping busy by doing some fiction and nonfiction writing, fighting spam, and filling in all the bits of my technical knowledge that I hadn't had time to learn before.

MY COMPUTERS

Computers I have owned

I was whelped on an Atari VCS (circa 1978; I had the Basic Programming cart) and weaned on a TI-99/4A (with Extended BASIC, 13K RAM, and a speech synthesizer!). From there I moved up to a Commodore 128, and then to a long line of Macintosh systems, the latest a G4 with an Apple Cinema Display.

I currently have a collection of about twenty old Apple Macintoshes, no two alike, including a few prototypes graciously given to me by David Fung.

Operating systems I like and dislike

Like any modern technological activist, I like Linux. I also like Mac OS despite its technological shotcomings and the company behind it. I despise Windows because of its technological shortcomings and the company behind it. Microsoft has shown a blatant and conscious disregard for the law, so I would like nothing better than to see the government break up Microsoft into three or more companies each selling its own version of Windows.

They (Microsoft) are special. They're the only ones in our industry that have been found guilty repeatedly of destroying companies. They destroyed Netscape; the most innovative company in Silicon Valley in a decade is gone. Microsoft paid people not to ship Netscape's browser. They treated Netscape with special prejudice, and they didn't stop until Netscape was dead.- Larry Ellison

Programming languages I like

• Lisp (elegant and clever)
• Forth (simple and straightforward)
• Perl (flexible and powerful)
• C and C++ (just kidding)

MY LIFE

One of my ancestors ran the Kendig Chocolate Company, and another ran the Muntz Pretzel Factory, both in the Amish country of southeastern Pennsylvania. My first ancestors in the New World were granted land there by William Penn in the early 1700's. I've done some genealogy research and so far I've charted my paternal ancestors back to 1565 in Zurich, Switzerland.

My hobbies reflect my nature as a computer hacker who grew up through the early days of home computing and now has enough money to get all the toys I wanted back then.

• I have more video games than I can count, all the way back to my old circa-1978 Atari VCS, but most of all I love emulations of old arcade and home video games and computers.
• I have (I think; I haven't counted) over thirty thousand Lego pieces spanning over thirty years of sets. I've set aside part of my home for a Lego town on a raised platform with plenty of trains running across it.
• I have a collection of puppets, mostly FolkTales, and I'm also a fan of voice acting. I used to be into stage acting too, back in high school and college (I was in the Princeton Triangle Club), but ever since then I haven't made time for it.
• I'm teaching myself to draw, but it's going to be a long time before I'm any good at it.

My 1992 Saturn SL2 means a lot to me. It's sleek, it's white, and it is easily distinguishable from Saturns which aren't mine by the license plate NCC 2000 (which used to be USS XLCR in California), the "Starfleet Academy" sticker in the back window, the pewter Excelsior figurine mounted on the dashboard, and the Darwin fish on the back of the car. Honk and wave a Vulcan hand-greeting if you see me on the road. I used to like new age music, though I've long since gotten tired of Yanni and moved more into techno and trance. I'll listen to classical, some jazz, and 70's / 80's / 90's stuff; I'll generally avoid rap, reggae, and country western.I've forgotten most of the composition classes I had in college and the piano lessons I had years earlier. After having quit my job, I've had to decide what I want to do with my life. And the first answer which leapt into my mind was that I want to go to Walt Disney World... Every Day. So I moved to Florida and built a house there.

VEGETATION

A banner from the (now-extinct) Multiplicity web site
(also, be sure to check out Nedscape)

MY FAVORITE FICTION

I used to watch Babylon 5 until its run ended, because it was a very good work of science fiction. (Well, until the fifth season at least.)

I don't watch Star Trek any more, because it's just awful these days.

I have always been a diehard Star Wars fan... at least until the rampant marketing saturation began and the disappointing Episode 1 was released, at which point I got tired of the franchise.

A RUBIK'S CUBE

MY PHILOSOPHY

The true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. The swineherd cannot already be wed to the princess when he embarks on his adventures, nor can the boy knock at the witch's door when she is away on vacation. The wicked uncle cannot be found out and foiled before he does something wicked. Things must happen when it is time for them to happen. Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpacked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.

- Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn

After several years of deep searching and investigation into several different religions, I have ended up as an atheist, and I have put up a web page explaining what I believe and why I believe it. I'm going to pull all of my notes and thoughts together into a book one of these days, or at least into a series of on-line articles.

I am open to discussion and questioning about anything I believe, and I am not condemning of beliefs that differ from my own. You are free to email me if there's anything you want to ask me about my beliefs or how I came to hold them. There's a lot of good atheist material online at other sites, too.

GOATS

Remember when we visited the little farm in Tilden park and you talked to the Saint Albans goat?

Everyone needs on occasion to look to a higher power for guidance. Scholarly minutia doesn't excite me and the spiritual path seems incomplete without weekly TV listings. Youth provided me with artful distractions until my liver cried uncle. I still see eidetic wisps fluid in the blue of sky. Over-torqued visionaries spout Internet glories, but only the lonely write sensible instructions on the use of the heart. That goat studied me unblinkingly. She knew all she needed.

You asked her, "How shall I proceed?"

She requested that I first feed her a choice morsel of corn, which I did. Then her wise eyes answered, "I am a goat who knows what I need to know. You are something much uglier and should proceed with modesty."

We fed her more corn and walked among the live oak.

- from the Netscape Handbook