You will be tested on this the next time I run into you at a party or dance, so pay attention!

You really oughta do your own FAQ file, so you can give people your URL and go onto something more original.

Well, I was born in Bremerton (not Bellingham ;-), Washington. That's the state off in the upper-left corner of the map; not close to Washington, D.C. It's where you find Seattle, home of Boeing and Microsoft (though I was fortunate to move away before the latter came to dominate the area). To your list of examples of geographic illiteracy in these United States, you can add the fact that a surprising number of people confuse the city of Washington and the state of Washington.

Actually, I'm only partly "from" there. Bremerton is the site of the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, where I was born in the Naval Hospital as WW-II was ending. It's sometimes amusing to reflect on the fact that I was born shortly before the first "stored program computer" was built. This presumably makes me an official old fart in the computing industry. Perhaps not surpisingly for someone born in such circumstances, my family moved about a bit. I grew up in places like Little Rock (Arkansas), Madison (Wisconsin), Flagstaff and Cottonwood (Arizona), and back to Kent and Bremerton and Port Orchard (all in Washington). Well, OK, some friends would quibble with the claim that I "grew up" anywhere; I won't go into that here. I also lived in Florida (Lauderdale and Clearwater) for maybe 5 years before moving to the Boston area in '83.

In Waltham, Massachusetts, USA. In the Cedarwood neighborhood. That's the triangle between 128, US20 and Brandeis. Nice neighborhood.

Yeah. Belmont, of course, has a reputation of being a classy sort of town, and Waltham is a Working Class town. So why the move? Well, we (Shelley and I) lived in an apartment on the south side of Belmont, and that's not nearly as classy as Belmont Hill. Then we found this nice house in the Yuppie section of Waltham, at a better price than most similar houses in classier towns. We like to tell people that we moved from the poorest part of one of the state's richest towns to the richest part of one of the poorest towns. Plus now we can actually tell people how to get to our house. And Waltham's a much more interesting town to be "from". There are starting to be local complaints about yuppification, however. The town even has its own brew pub, on Moody street a block south of the Charles River, and some classy apartments are going up there in what used to be a big department store, so the writing is on the wall.

As you might guess from the mere existence of this file, I'm one of those computer people that infest the Boston area.

Well, sorta. It's misleading, because I didn't go to MIT. However, I did work at project Athena for some time 'way back in its beginning. Jim Gettys was right down the hall, trying to get the very first versions of X Windows up on some Vaxen. It was a strange place, and went through a lot of changes. I was one of the radicals arguing for developing things that eventually became Kerberos, Hesiod, and all those other Greek critters. At the time I was there ('84), the management's reply was that this was blue-sky stuff that wasn't in their charter, and I should work on more practical things. I'm beginning to think they were right, seeing how these have turned out. On the other hand, I argued a lot for a real network file system (along the lines of the Newcastle Connection), rather than inferior systems like NFS. I more and more think I was right on that one. Grumble ... Oh, well; NFS is a durned sight better than what Microsoft is starting to foist on the net with smb. But I digress, and you're getting sleepy ....

You didn't get here from my résumé, did you? OK, I got a B.A in math from Washington State, and a M.S. in computer sciences from the U of Wisconsis (Madison). I also did some work toward a Ph.D., but got involved in doing research and software development instead. The reasons that I didn't go to MIT? Well, I was accepted there. Not surprising, since I was voted Class Genius in high school, but this should be kept in perspective: I was the first kid in that school to ever get an 800 on an SAT. But there was this little problem of money. My family wasn't rich, and even worse was the way that they were uneducated and proud of the fact. I was getting far too uppity thinking I could go to some place like MIT; no financial aid there. But personal ties got me a full scholarship at the state U over in Pullman, so I was off. Life's like that, sometimes.

Well, no, actually. You might find the story interesting. One mistake I made as an undergraduate was to get a student loan from the gummint. Remember the National Defense Student Load program? Sounded good. No payment until you leave school, and all that.

Well, what happened was, after I passed prelims, I got the annual form letter from the loan program asking if I was still a full-time student. As a post-prelim student, I filled it in with the usual info about "independent study" and work on a thesis. The reply was that I was no longer a full-time student, and it was time to start paying them back. I replied that I was clearly still a full-time student. Their reply was "Oh, a deadbeat, eh? Well, in that case, pay up RIGHT NOW." They filed suit against me in a court 2000 miles away (San Francisco), and gave me a clear choice: Pay up immediately, or fight them in court. Of course, to do that would require dropping out of school and getting a job to pay the legal and travel expenses, so they'd win and I'd have to pay them back anyway. So I dropped out and managed to pay them back in a couple years.

This story comes in handy occasionally in talks about student loans. It's my contention that we should make schooling free to as far as a bright kid can take it. I was the first of any of my relatives to get a college degree of any sort. Loans are easily used to limit the education that a poor kid can get. Scholarships can't easily be used this way.

Actually, they may have done me a favor, financially speaking. Since then, I see industry salary surveys every year or two, and one of the curious things about the computer field is that people with masters degrees consistently get paid more than people with PhDs. If they hadn't forced me out of school, I'd probably be a faculty member somewhere making $40K a year, and still wondering if I'd ever get tenure. Now I know I'll never have tenure anywhere, but I make two to three times that much money each year writing software for the shifting flock of companies around Route 128.

Well, I play a lot of music. Mostly folk music. No, not that "singer with out of tune guitar stuff". Instrumental, mostly. A lot of folk-dance music. You remember when the music industry was blindsided by the success of the Bulgarian women's vocal group, a few years back? Well, I found myself singing along with several of the cuts on that CD. They were familiar tunes, from my years of involvement with the international folkdance scene. Here in the Boston area, I play several nights each month for various Contras and Scottish Country dances, and I'm one of the ringleaders of the local Scandinavian dance group, Speledans. While I'm at it, I should give a pointer to the Folk Arts Center, the Boston area's main cleainghouse for folkdance events. They run a lot of dances themselves (and I play at some of them). Another group that I play with a lot is the Cambridge Folk Orchestra.

Whatever I can get away with. About half the time I play accordion; I usually also take along a fiddle and/or mandolin, and a collection of various kinds of flutes (whistle, recorder, kaval, ocarina, ...).

I don't know which is my favorite. But the most popular is the accordion.

Yup. Of course, it's probably because not many people play it in this part of the world. If there were a thousand accordion players in the Boston area, and I were one of a handful of fiddle players, I'd probably be playing fiddle a lot more, for the variety. But for various historical reasons, accordions aren't common in North America, so if you like to add to a groups's variety, it's a good instrument to have. And like any other keyboard, an accordion can contribute a lot because it's a good backup instrument. If a group is rhythmically weak (the worst sin when playing for dancing), I can dominate and force a rhythm on the group. Of course, a piano or bass is even better, but they're not as portable (yet).

Yeah; it's a "chromatic" accordion. It's all the rage in much of Europe. I borrowed one from a friend some years back, and after a month of diddling around with it in my spare time, I realized that I could already play it better than the piano keyboard that I'd been playing since I was a kid. She wasn't playing it, so I bought it from her, and eventually sold my piano accordions. I recently got a nice small one (96-bass) from Castiglione (out in Michigan) recently. It only weighs about 15 lb (7 kg), so I can carry it around on my shoulder at festivals without breaking my shoulder. And it has a real nice musette reed.

Nah; I've tried those, but they take a while to learn. Worth it if you're into any of the various traditions that use them, of course. But I'm too eclectic; I prefer an instrument that isn't limited to a few keys. The great thing about a chromatic keyboard is that all the keys have the same fingering. You don't much care what key you're in. If you learned something in D and some turkey wants to play it in Bb, hey, no problem.

On the other hand, and idea I've had is to get together an accordion band with the rule that you can only join if you have a different keyboard than anyone else who's already in the band. I figure you could get a huge group together that way ...

Not really; I view electronics as just another kind of instrument, and most of them aren't really as good as older instruments (and less portable, due to the need to plug in). However, I have gotten involved in computerized music notation, through the "abc" gang.

It's an interesting development. There are lots of commercial music packages on the market. But they all have a common failing: They all use complicated, proprietary files, sorta like word processing software does. You can only share files with friends who have the same package, and usually the files are very large and binary, so they don't email well. The abc software, in contrast, was developed by a bunch of "amateur" musicians, mostly Irish and Scandinavian. It uses an ASCII format that's easy to type (and fairly easy to read). The files are small and emailable. They can be downloaded in seconds across the web. And the software is mostly free.

There is a growing body of abc-formatted music on the net. If you're a musician, you should check it out. You can find full details at the abc home page. If you're also a programmer, you can download the source and start contributing to the effort. You can find some of my music files in my music/abc subdirectory.

Yep. My SO, Shelley, is highly allergic to most furry critters, so she has had pet birds most of her life. Mostly small parrots. We currently have four: Two cockatiels and two Bourke's parakeets. The Bourke's are cute little things, new to American pet stores. They're called "grass sparrows" or "sparrow parakeets" in Australia, and from above they look much like English sparrows. From below they look like small parrots, with pink, white and pale blue colors. The appearance from above is presumably protective coloration; they spend much of their time on the ground. They are only about 6 months old, and we don't know their sexes. We call them Tweeterdee and Tweeterdum. They run around a lot on the floor like like little windup toys, tweeting in a musical manner.

The cockatiels are both about 5 years old, a male and a female. They aren't quite a mated pair, mostly because while the male (a lutino that we mostly call "Pest") finds the female (natural, mostly called "Sweetie") very fascinating when she goes into heat, he can't figure out what it is that he wants to do to her. So she stays frustrated, and lays infertile eggs every few months, which they both greatly enjoy sitting on, but which don't produce babies. Maybe it's just as well.

On the other hand, Pest may be stupid, but he's an accomplished musician. Not only does he whistle the Andy Griffith theme song (like most male cockatiels), but he has also been known to sing other well-known themes, such as Mozart's 40th symphony and Grieg's Per Gynt. He also does a cardinal territorial call well enough to disturb the cardinals that nest in the trees behind the house. And when we have people over playing music, he joins right in. Many musicians have been startled to realize that he's whistling along in the same key, and matching their rhythms. He has some quite inventive ideas about harmony.

Oh, yeah. Where to start? Back when I lived and researched in Madison, I was married for several years to Alison, and as a result have a daughter Julie who recently graduated from the U of Wisconsin. Her things are photography and metalworking and other artsy things. When she gets her own home page, I'll add a link to it.

Meanwhile, while living in Florida, I met Shelley, a flute player, fiddler, mapmaker, and statistical economist (with a Masters from Boston U). She also has a daughter, Jane, who is out wandering around the country with her SO. Shelley and I got married some time ago, but I've found that the PC thing on the net is to say "SO" rather than "wife". Keeps people wondering, you know.

As for extended family, well, one of the nice things we've found about living here in Boston, is that we're both so far away from all the rest of our families that it takes a special effort to get together with them. We don't do it very often. It results in friendly relations all around. Neither of our families are the techie types that we are, so distant relations are probably the best.