Photoblogs – I hope you have a high speed connection

This is so addictive: Photoblogs.org – The Photoblog Resource. Just start clicking and you find yourself immersed in awesome imagery. I started with the most popular… c h r o m a s i a and was floored by the rich colors and interesting compositions.

This is so addictive: Photoblogs.org – The Photoblog Resource. Just start clicking and you find yourself immersed in awesome imagery. I started with the most popular… c h r o m a s i a and was floored by the rich colors and interesting compositions.

The Art of Math

Bathsheba Grossman is an artist who is "exploring the region between art and mathmatics". She uses a "direct-metal printing technique" to render mathmatical models as 3D sculptures. I love this idea – when I first heard about 3D printers, I thought it would be great to make sculptures with them, here’s someone who has taken … Continue reading “The Art of Math”

Bathsheba Grossman is an artist who is "exploring the region between art and mathmatics". She uses a "direct-metal printing technique" to render mathmatical models as 3D sculptures. I love this idea – when I first heard about 3D printers, I thought it would be great to make sculptures with them, here’s someone who has taken the leap…

Heavy Metal Espresso

When I was working at Vicinity, we (Jerry) managed to talk the execs into buying us this awesome machine for the office… The Pasquini Livia 90. We got a steady supply of fresh beans from the Hanover Co-op, and we were all highly productive. Then Microsoft bought us and moved us out of the "Farmhouse" … Continue reading “Heavy Metal Espresso”

When I was working at Vicinity, we (Jerry) managed to talk the execs into buying us this awesome machine for the office…

The Pasquini Livia 90.
We got a steady supply of fresh beans from the Hanover Co-op, and we
were all highly productive. Then Microsoft bought us and moved us out
of the "Farmhouse" and into some fancy office space. And, they decided to switch to a wimpy pod machine. Luckily, I won the office lottery and got to bring home the Pasquini. So, every morning (at least), I have an awesome cappuccino…and as they say, life is too short for bad espresso.

The saying on the side of this machine is great:

For Music – Puccini
For Art – Bernini
For Espresso – Pasquini

 

rebeccasart

Rebecca (my better half) is a great artist. She does it all — oil, watercolor, pastel. Landscapes on location, florals, abstracts, figures… and teaches a lot as well. It’s great to be able to hang her work all over our house. You should check it out: http://www.rebeccasart.com.

Rebecca (my better half) is a great artist. She does it all — oil, watercolor, pastel. Landscapes on location, florals, abstracts, figures… and teaches a lot as well. It’s great to be able to hang her work all over our house. You should check it out: http://www.rebeccasart.com.

Sometimes it works

Sometimes, the technology actually works. Right now, I’m at home, typing this in on the trusty ol’ iMac 400. To my left is my laptop from work… connected wirelessly to the home network, and then through the incredibly fast cable connection to the net. My laptop is "RAS’d" into work, which is MicroSpeak for securely … Continue reading “Sometimes it works”

Sometimes, the technology actually works. Right now, I’m at home, typing this in on the trusty ol’ iMac 400. To my left is my laptop from work… connected wirelessly to the home network, and then through the incredibly fast cable connection to the net. My laptop is "RAS’d" into work, which is MicroSpeak for securely connected, smartcard and all. From there, I’ve got a remote terminal session running to my desktop at work. I’m running VisualStudio Whidbey and debugging an application that I’m running on the PocketPC connected to that desktop by a USB dock. I can see the display window by using an ActiveSync Display tool that shows the actual PPC display on my desktop screen.

And I’m doing this in Vermont.

Begin at the beginning

Well, I guess the first post is the toughest, so I should just get it out there… I started playing with computers back in 1976, my senior year of high school. Our math teacher somehow got us TTY access to a mainframe, I think it was at Fairleigh Dickinson University. We wrote BASIC programs and … Continue reading “Begin at the beginning”

Well, I guess the first post is the toughest, so I should just get it out there…

I started playing with computers back in 1976, my senior year of high school. Our math teacher somehow got us TTY access to a mainframe, I think it was at Fairleigh Dickinson University. We wrote BASIC programs and saved them onto paper tape. Then my good friend Michael discovered a star trek game… after each move we’d see a new page with and ascii map of the updated positions. I was hooked.

After high school, I bounced around a few years. I went to Syracuse University for TV/Radio. I had a fun time there, met Rebecca (obviously the reason that I went to Syracuse!), and moved on after two years.

After a year in LA, returned to NY city and the Institute for Audio Research, where I learned to run the "big iron" mixing consoles… then to San Francisco with Rebecca, where she and I learned to love the fog. We lived a block from the beach and two from the park, down in the sunset district. I loved San Francisco…but we returned back east after a few years. In 1982, I got married to Rebecca and ended up back in college – RIT – studying computer programming. It was there I discovered Unix, VAX/VMS, and Usenet.

Toward the end of RIT, I was on the WELL, dialing up from Rochester, NY on my modem. I didn’t realize I was hob-knobbing with so many gurus 🙂  Around the same time, I set up a BBS with my friend Daniel, and began to explore the wonder world of online communities.

In 1986, I was doing an internship with some speech recognition researchers in Rochester. Back then, they were just trying to get a Sun workstation to understand zero through nine from any speaker. I was writing modules to create various graphs of sampled speech – that was lots of fun.

After RIT, I landed a dream job at New England Digital — creators of the Synclavier, one of the world’s first digital synthesizers. We packed up and moved to Norwich, Vermont. At NED, I worked on UI programming for a real-time music editing system. Initially, I was writing for the VT-640, but then we moved onto the Mac. I wrote the first version of a nifty program called EditView, which allowed all kinds of fun transformations to the recorded sequence. NED (as I knew it) is long gone, but the legacy lives on.

Today, nearly 20 years and a few jobs later, I am working for Microsoft, in the MapPoint group – it’s been about two years since they bought Vicinity.

What a long, strange trip it’s been.