Gainful Employment The Academy My first job out of college is for an obscure think-tank in Washington, DC. called the Academy for Advanced and Strategic Studies. Fresh out of school, I have this naive dream of being able to escape the real world and instead do interdisciplinary Research & Development for the rest of my life. The Academy isn't really an Academy per se, it's actually a group of people supporting an eccentric, bizarre genius type named Gregg Edwards (everyone calls him "gee" -- for his initials). The work we do is a mix of computers, city planning, physics, political theory, and the arts. I spend a year here, working "required" 72 hour weeks on projects like free-text databases, statistical polling of organizations, bar-coding everything, and building a movie theater on the top floor. The basic message I get is that my work is crap: naive, badly conceived, badly executed, crap. While this is actually about right -- I am just out of college after all, and have no clue what hard work is -- I'm in no mood to hear this. My life's been going pretty well so far, and I think I'm fairly hot shit. After a year of up and downs (mainly downs) I'm booted out of the Academy. Flint Electronics/Downtown Networks I go to work for a whacked hardware guy named Paul Flint. Flint is a freelance computer consultant, a 40-year old who wears a Grateful Dead tie (to freak out the Washington types, he says), owns a barely-working electric car and can build just about anything. He's a really good hardware guy, and figures he might be able to make some money off a software type like me. We spend about a year together, working for the usual Beltway Bandits doing whatever pays the bills (everything from installing networks to custom programming). Unfortunately, being a small software company means you're quiet vulnerable to business cycles. So, after George Bush & co. had done a whopper on the DC. economy, things were pretty lousy at Flint world headquarters. Audio Atomizer During this period, I've come up with the idea of a program called "Audio Atomizer" which would lets you chop up digital audio files, breaking apart the word and sound components. You can then drag 'n' drop the parts together and make people say all sorts of interesting things. The project was inspired by a contest held by some people related to Negativland who wanted to get back at U2 for suing Negativland. The contest was a call for covers of U2 songs that would most insult U2. I thought a sample composition with U2 producer Brian Eno saying things like "U2 is really meaningless, a big bath of noise." So... I decided to write a program to help me do it. Of course, it took a long time to do this, and I completely missed the submission deadline. Eventually, a 6000 word vocabulary of Clinton, Perot and Bush was created and the package became a commercial product. Discovery Channel After Flint, I get work as a database programmer for the Discovery Channel, working in Paradox, Visual Basic, and Lotus Notes. Discovery is starting to put in an Internet connection, but I feel that there is no good way to find things on the 'net (this is before the world-wide-web has appeared, when telnet and ftp ruled). So, I compile a 1600 page help file of all the resources on the Internet, and call it the Desktop Internet Reference. At the time, it was fairly popular, but now it has been completely superseded by things like Yahoo. After about a year and a half, they let me go (along with several others) in order to make room for the manager's buddies from the manager's previous company. Next page: The Early Years of Running a Company Previous page: Childhood & College