About Brian
Fantastic! Incredible! Marvelous! Amazing! Astounding! Extraordinary! Magnificent! Splendid!
"How," I asked myself, "can I express the kind of person I am? How do I sum up that my life revolves around technology and new media, that I value skill and imagination over mindless conformity, that I watch The Big Bang Theory every week but have never watched Survivor, that I hail from Tulsa and Philadelphia and San Jose and Orlando and incorporate a bit of each in myself, that I love to know people with a passion and devotion to interests too deep or eclectic for the mainstream?"
Then it dawned on me. "I am a geek, and I should say so."
I am really good at: Listening, encouraging, affirming. Teaching by way of analogies. Writing (and good spelling, grammar, and punctuation count!). Understanding how things work. Fixing things that break. Remembering useless trivia while watching game shows.
I am straight but not narrow. I believe in the ability to understand the universe we live in; myths have their place in literature, but not in science. I am a Wikipedia editor and admin. I am as much into Disney as I am into anime, as much 80s music as trance music, as much Star Wars as Star Trek, as much mint as chocolate, as much stocks as animals, as much Dance Dance Revolution as model railroading.
I work with computers, but when I get tired of pushing bits around on a screen, I put my hands on Lego bricks and I build things. I participated in the development program for the Lego Mindstorms robotics kit.
I do not care for smoking, drinking, or drugs, though if you enjoy them in moderation, I'm not one to judge.
I am allergic to pointless drama.
When I Was Born
I was born at an early age. I don't remember it very 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.' I treat the Disney parks as my own local suburban mall, going to one for a few hours every now and then to catch a show, grab a bite to eat, or peoplewatch.
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.
My Keirsey Temperament Rating
ENFP (Extraverted iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving), the "Champion".
My Philosophy
That was Zen; this is Tao. Here, have some proverbs.
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 "help.netscape.com", fed and cared for the "My Netscape" site, managed all of the email autoreplies for the company, and was variously involved in everything from system administration to customer service to webmastering to site design 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 in United States v. Microsoft. I left after AOL's takeover ruined the company.
After that, I worked at Apple Computer, Inc., as a system administrator and production environment manager on the iTools project (now MobileMe). 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 could focus on pointing my life in the right direction. In 2000 I moved to Florida and used my Netscape stock to put a down payment on a house and live life at a slower pace for a while, 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. In 2007 I started dating Jill, and in 2009 she moved in with me.
With the downturn of the economy I've gone back to a full-time job making web sites, but I still feel that I haven't yet set out towards my true calling.
My Computers
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 MacBook Pro that dual-boots Mac OS X and Windows Vista.
I currently have a collection of about thirty old Apple Macintoshes, including a few prototypes graciously given to me by David Fung. I have restored most of these computers to working order and out-of-box condition.
I really want to like Linux. I've been wrestling with it for two decades, but I haven't found much use for it as a desktop operating system so far.
I acknowledge Microsoft's place in the market, and I use their technology in my work, but I don't have to like them.
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.
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've watched every minute of Star Trek every produced. Deep Space Nine is my favorite series, Enterprise is my least favorite, and Voyager has grown on me. I used to be a Star Wars fan until the rampant marketing saturation began and the disappointing Episode 1 was released. The Clone Wars hand-animated series was good. The Clone Wars computer-animated series is terrible. I've always had a soft place in my heart for Babylon 5.
- I still drive my 1992 Saturn SL2. I keep it well-maintained and it still runs great. It has license plate
NCC 2000(formerlyUSS XLCRwhen I was in California), a "Starfleet Academy" sticker in the back window, a pewter Excelsior figurine mounted on the dashboard, and a Darwin fish above the rear bumper.
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 music composition classes I had in college and the piano lessons I had years earlier.
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