A Bit More About Me

Well, in that first post, I gave you a taste of my sense of humor.  Now let me tell you a bit more about me, and what my interests are.

I was a geek from early on.  Of course, back then, we didn't have that word.  I was the sort who used to ace those silly achievement tests they gave us in elementary school.  I remember one from the second grade where I missed one question.  It was the last one on that section and they agreed that I had just marked the wrong answer because I was tired.  The word was "glimpse" and I apparently answered, "A small monkey."  I know I would never have said that.

When I was in the fourth grade, I irritated my teacher because I preferred reading the encyclopedia to listening to her.  Of course, the stuff in the encyclopedia was more interesting.  I especially fascinated by the article on cancer in one of the year books.  I developed a hypothesis that cancer was caused by things irritating tissues.

I was the one who had a microscope and a chemistry set.  And of course, all my peers thought I was weird.  I was fascinated by how things worked.  Given half a chance, I would take something apart to figure it out.

I didn't want a playhouse.  I wanted a fully equipped laboratory.

In junior high school, I showed how a solar cell worked by making a galvometer out of a compass and wire, and I would read my science teacher's lab technician textbook.  She asked if I was just looking at the pictures and was a bit put off when I said I was reading it.  She had trouble with it in college.  And I was a whiz in algerbra.

Then I got to high school.  I did well in biology, and was a whiz in the lab at chemistry, but I had a teacher who didn't seem to think I could do well at math.  The sad thing was, I believed her.  By the end of my junior year, I was convinced I was a bust at math and decided to study something in college that would not require math.  Of course, I was miserable.

And then a funny thing happened.  I had a friend who was an engineering student.  He worked a lot with the computer.  I mentioned that I had heard you could play games on the computer, and he asked if I was interested in learning to use it.  Well, of course I was.  I had wondered into the computer center and had been fascinated and a bit intimidated by these wonderful machines full of blinking lights and switches. 

My friend talked me into joining him there...at three in the morning.  He explained that was when you got more time.  By dawn, I had written a simple program that solved the Pythagorean theorem.  When that program, written on punch cards, ran, I was hooked.  In a few days, I learned how to access the games, and taught myself to write programs.

My first computer was a Univac 1110.  A huge mainframe, with terminals around the campus.  Well, it wasn't "mine," but I treated it like a personal computer.  I was using my friend's professor's account.  Apparently he was cool with this, as there was no way he could miss the fact that I was burning up computer time at a rather rapid pace.

When I dropped out of college, I was still convinced that I could not do math, but I was good with computers.  Unfortunately, I had no credentials and I ended up getting married.  I bought a home computer, and started playing around with the idea of selling programs.

I managed to market a few small programs, but I was always finding something new to play with.  I decided to go back to school and study electronics.  There I discovered I was good at math after all.  I taught myself elementary calculus, so I could understand something that were beyond me.  My instructors thought I was a genius, and I was recommended for an internship at a very prestigious research institute.  And then my mother died.  I just fell apart.  I dropped out of school.  And my marriage suffered.

I heard about a possible job.  Ironically, the place I applied was not the right one, but I got hired anyway.  I spent a couple of years writing all sorts of programs.  I worked on both software and hardware.  One of the projects went up on the space shuttle.  And then the bubble burst.  I was laid off in the tech turn down at the turn of the century.  My marriage broke up, and I moved to California.  I struggled, but I have a good job, with a major university.  I do some programming on the side.

For a while, I tried to deny my geekiness.  Oh, it popped up all the time, but I tried to hide it.  Now I have realized that I am what I am, and I embrace it.

Thus this blog.