I am one of the lucky few who does something for a living that I enjoy: Computer Science (in various forms). And I have a chosen set of hobbies which also entertain and delight me to no end!
To give you some idea about who I am I offer the following with which I identify (in no particular order): Engineer, romantic poet, philosopher, writer, flyer, driver, sailor, musician, craftsman, ... a somewhat unique mix of perfectionist/realist/idealist/optimist/sentimentalist, loyal friend...
From here you can browse:
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the '60s, I grew up in a strange time and place. Not a Baby Boomer - some call us Generation X - and somehow always associated with JFK in my mind - perhaps because of the New Orleans connection in his death. New Orleans was, and I suppose still is, a strange paradox of time and place, always perhaps 10 years behind the times, yet somehow far ahead. And it has certainly always been an interesting cultural mix. With Texas and Mississippi as neighbors, and the Muddy Mississippi flushing the industrial effluent from Northern Yankee Businesses through our borders, Louisiana seemed trapped in an ethereal whirlpool.
One bizarre morning, still a teenager, I awoke from this dream and found myself in quite another: The San Francisco Bay Area, in the boom time of the early '80s... 2 AM on April 8, 1984, to be more precise... I had been a Machine Language programmer for TANO in New Orleans, while going to Tulane University, but now I worked for Digital Equipment Corp., and was a complete neophyte in the world of Big Business. . . But I'm a quick study.
A few years there, and a transfer to Colorado meant an introduction to WINTER! That's where my car collection really took off! So, VMS internals, and virtually every "layered product" (and the inevitable crash dumps) filled my working days, while Karmann Ghias and Porsches consumed all the rest of my time. But eventually, DEC gradually began to whither - I decided to get out while the gettin was good! I'd been there for 5 years, so I figured it was time to move on - that was in '89. And again, I got Lucky, and ended up with Relational Technology Inc. back in sunny CA. (Ingres was a GREAT product.)
The Relational model - basically set theory - and Ingres internals... no big deal for a Systems programmer. After all, an Ingres Server is like a mini-operating system. . . a few good years - DECUS symposia, consulting assignments, developing & delivering training (sometimes in Europe!) server internals, installation scripts, and lets not forget Replication! ... and a lot of bad management, and the next thing you knew, Computer Associates was after us! Unfortunately, they bought ASK (who owned Ingres)... That was on June 27, 1994, and Ingres, as they say, was history.
A few independent Consulting gigs, and before I knew it, Mike Stonebraker asked if I would help him and his team with an Illustra application. (Mike, if you didn't know it, is one of the key Relational Database folks in the world, having managed the Ingres project at the University of California, Berkeley - it's world famous!) Illustra comes from the Postgres project at UCB, which weds the Relational world to the "Object Oriented" paradigm. It's the worlds first practical, production ORDBMS (Object Relational Data Base Management System).
Now it's been a few years and I've gotten a grant of my own. I'm Co-Investigator on OceanESIP. And I've followed in the grand tradition of computer scientists at UC Berkeley by commercializing my research. ...If you wish to browse materials related to any of my work, please click here.
I have a lot of interests, and pursue a large number of them on an "occasional" basis. But there is no question about which is the most dominant. Because the dominant one will get so much air time, I'll mention here some of the less dominant ones: Aviation, Travel, Beer, Swimming, Music, Philosophy and Poetry... and there must be a few more things, but they escape me for the moment. There's a short bit on these below.
Aviation was my first passionate subject. I visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum when I was five and it really grabbed me. I became a pilot as soon as it was legal for me to do so, and bought my own plane before that even - a 1947 Cessna 140.
I got the travel bug when I was young too. Before I was a high school freshman I had already visited about half the principal cities of the U.S. and most of the States. Then in '77 I made my first trip to Europe - I was 14. Since then I've made it back about a dozen times, but at the unfortunate neglect of the rest of the globe. Oh well, there are still more neat places to see!
Beer? What's not to like? I'm partial to things meant to be drunk just
below room-temp - and I always have. I was one of the buyers who helped
change the beer market to "micro-brews"
I'm partial to Cajun, Zydeco, and Rhythm and Blues - oh yes, and "Dinosaur
Rock!"
And, the more dominant Hobby? My automobile collection!
I collect and personally restore '50s era Karmann Ghias, Porsche 356s, Rometsches, and a special kind of Karmann Ghia (also from the '50s) known as the Montage Suisse. And, I'm also into Vintage speed equipment for the same cars...
I am the Founder and President of the Karmann Ghia Club of North America. We publish the Karmann Chronicles magazine somewhere near 6 times a year.
http://KarmannGhia.org/Richard/4200 Park Blvd. #151, Oakland, CA, 94601, USA.