Hello all,
I am glad to make this belated introduction.
I have to disclaim any sort of regular status, but that is not for lack
of desire. My schedule is too often committed and I have rarely
found/made windows of opportunity to jump back in. It's often months
between even checking the mailbox I have setup for this group and I
have some 7,923 unread group messages. I've been arranging my life
anew and believe I'll have more cycles to devote to this. However, I'm
hip-deep into writing my own sci-fi novel so when I find such
time+space+energy I don't even flip a coin to decide where I'll put my
resources: I role loaded dice.
But your still all winners to me - really... Let's do lunch!
I'm 43, self-employed software designer, married with one kindergarten
aged boy. My wife is VP of Las Olas, an adventure travel company that
caters exclusively to women who wish to learn surfing, art, fashion,
golfing, "we make girls out of women" ... Check out
http://www.surflasolas.com/ if you gals think this is of interest.
Guys, this fills my life with lovely curves and giggles and is the
closest thing to living on a campus again.
I was not born a poor black child, but I did grow up in a cabin with
dirt floors on the Little Sandy river near Portland, Oregon. I come
from a multi-generation science-fiction clan and clearly remember my
first book in third grade was my mother's hard-bound "I, Robot," by
Asimov telling little Robbie's sad adventure. After High School I
painted some overlarge murals in downtown Portland before heading to
New Orleans to study painting and architecture. By the time this was
ending I was thoroughly disgusted with the intellectual fashion show
architecture really is, but I had already been bitten by the computer
system design bug and quickly turned a hobby into a Silicon Valley
career. I've run my own software development company since 1988
working on the bleeding edge of multimedia, publishing CD-ROM libraries
of seamless, tile-able, textures for 3D rendering, games - but mostly
user interface design. My last salary gig was running a development
team working on interactive TV in Amsterdam before the dot-com crash
sent me and my fledgling family back to the San Francisco Bay Area. We
live on the Monterey Bay these days and as I am severely under-employed
in these gloomy neo-Depression days, I am wondering if I should have
followed through on my architectural inclination. It's certainly hard
to believe I am part of a vital American high-tech industry any more.
Jack o' many trades, master of some. On the silver-lining side, I can
see a clear path to completing my long-dusty story by end of this year.
My novel, Starswept, has some intersections with Brin's uplift
framework and this is what drew me to the group initially.
This was a bit more long-winded than expected, but writing is a real
passion now and I find it easy to let the words dribble off my
fingertips to spill across the keyboard. Mostly I make sense, but no
guarantees. Bear with, or ignore my messages, as you see fit.
Ciao, dah-links,
- JG -
BTW - I maintain an on-line presence via iChat/AOL that you are all
free to intrude upon: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Jonathan Gibson
www.formandfunction.com/word
_______________________________________________
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