Childhood I was born in London, where I stayed for 6 months. At that point, my parents jumped over to France, where I lived in Paris until I was 9.5 years old. My father was working for Singer Sewing Machines and they brought him back to Singer Headquarters in Chicago. After a year of that my father decided to quit the corporate scene and we moved to San Francisco, then out to Marin County where he started a house renovating company. This lasted about 4 years, then the California real estate market went belly up and we moved to New Haven, Connecticut. I went to public high school for a year, then Reagan cut funding for it and it closed down :( so I moved over to a private High School named Hopkins. Work Begins At this point I'm 13 years old. I start working afternoons after school at the Yale MIS department, filing IBM Mainframe JCL output (fun!). In a few months, I move up to making forms on a pre-prelease Mac, then on to form bursting, printing & shredding! (more fun!) When I turned 14, they offered me a job at some ridiculous wage (I think it was $3.15 an hour). You'd think there would be child labor laws governing this sort of thing, but evidently, Universities are exempt of this sort of nuisance, and they can legally hire a 14 year old. Since my allowance was $10 a week, it seemed like a pretty good deal to me. Plus, it was dream work: I was to write software demonstrating pre-release hardware that had been given to the University. "Do interesting things" they told me. So, I wrote a program to simulate printed handwriting. I digitized handwritten characters from a digitizing pad, then wrote a plotter driver to simulate that person's handwriting. I put in a little randomization, picking different versions of the same characters. Presto! The output looked just as messy as hand-written text! At this point, the Yale University Health Services people are using an ancient Prime Minicomputer that runs a variation of Dartmouth BASIC called PrimeBasic. Their only programmer/analyst has skipped town to go work for the evil people at Harvard, and the YUHS need someone to fill in. Since BASIC (and some assembly) is all that I know (I've been programming a monochrome IBM PC w/ROM basic at home) they hire me. It turns out that, as far as huge mainframes go, the Prime is fairly easy to program, and you can muck with multi-tasking by putting whole programs on one line -- it multitasks per line so your program goes REALLY FAST! Of course, I get my first dose of office politics: some people want to dump the Prime and are sabotaging efforts to make it useful in order to hasten the process. I'm oblivious to this (or indifferent, I don't remember which) and just keep hacking away at the Prime. Since I'm the only systems person, I have my run of the system. As any programmer will tell you, if you remove all the obstacle of bureaucracy around systems development, they work 10 times faster and have a ball while doing it! Oh yeah, I've also written a Shareware DOS program for making Audio Cassette J-cards. It's sorta WYSIWYG, written in compiled QuickBasic and directly manipulates Video memory for speed. It's horrible spaghetti code, but to my great surprise it does really well, with about 400 paid registration coming in. It's called "Cassette" (and later "Turbo Cassette"). College Eventually, I have to go college. I have lousy grades because I'm working all the time, and can't be bothered with school, so out of 12 (!) colleges I apply to, one admits me and another wait-lists me. I'm off to Bates College in Maine to obtain an education. My first semester goes badly, probably because I'm really not very interested in anything so I don't study. Then, in the second semester, I take a Philosophy course. Bang! I'm hooked. I work at YUHS during the summer, and take almost nothing but Philosophy courses sophomore year. At the same time, I apply and get accepted to a "study at the Paris University" program sponsored by SUNY Stony Brook. At this point I'm thinking about a career in Philosophy, and so I make plans to spend the summer in Berlin at the Goethe Institut, learning German (German and French are good Philosophy languages). Through all this, my computer playing is getting more "professional." Turner Broadcasting has found my "cassette" program and has hired me to write a program to make the stick-on labels for their audio cassettes. I'm into Assembly Language now and have written a smooth-scrolling television display program (like the Weather Channel) for the college television station. This thing runs on a vaguely-compatible 3.2mhz PC clone w/128k of memory. I think I spent 3 months working on smooth-scrolling algorithms that would work on this slow a machine. To my knowledge, the program is still in operation today. In the process, I've also written a general icon drawing and animation program called "Megadraw." It helps you draw 24x24 pixel pictures, 16 frames of them for animation, and can write Assembly, C or QuickBasic code to create the animation which you then insert into your program. It's Shareware, and sells really poorly -- I think I received one registration. But, it's very photogenic, so it shows up in many catalogs, even making it as a selection of the Shareware of the month club. For some reason, at this time I can't conceive of programming for a living. This is probably due to the time spent with the plaid-wearing, facial-twitching professional programmers at Yale. Surely, I don't want to end up like them. So, I'm off to Berlin to learn German (at the Goethe Institut). I spend 3.5 months there, avoiding riots (there are many). Then I'm off to Paris. I get a tiny apartment in the 11th district, and go to my first classes. They are really dull, and I ask the program director if I can do the Master's (Maitrise) program. They consent, and so I hunt around for the names I've read about in books. Julia Kristeva Most of the big names are dead, but I end up taking classes with Julia Kristeva (at Jussieu), Sarah Koffmann at Sorbonne/Pantheon, the director of the Michel Foucault Institute at Nanterre, some existentialist guy at St. Denis, and some Aristotelian bore at Nanterre. At the end of the year, I make a 3 hour master's presentation on my topic of "Nietzsche and World War II." After Paris, I'm back to finish college (after a Master's degree, I know this sounds strange). I take a lot of required courses :( and write another thesis on Nietzsche, this time on Nietzsche's linguistic theory -- it's called "Wet Language." I spend a good deal of time with philosophy professor David Kolb (who is now doing hypertext novels, go figure!). Next page: Gainful Employment