Work

Since January 2003, I've been a professional nature photographer.

I used to work at Liberate Technologies in Redwood Shores, in the Silicon Valley area of the San Francisco Bay Area. In May 1997 I had started work at Navio Communications in Sunnyvale, a few days after I started working there, it was announced that Navio would soon merge with NCI. (Surprise!!!) NCI was for Network Computer, Inc., and works on software and technology for little computing devices. It's pretty neat. In May 1999 we changed our name again, and became Liberate. In July 1999 we had a successful IPO.

What I've been working on in particular is even neater. I'm on the DTV Team (logo at left) -- helping to bring the Internet to cable TV set-top boxes for customers such as Cable and Wireless. I get to play with TV's that have the Internet and TV signals at the same time. I'd tell you more, but then I'd either have to kill you or hire you.

Don't ask about the parrot and the gorilla. Or do.

Of course, at times I can get a bit overexcited about this stuff. One day two people came into my office at NCI. One was a quiet, yuppie-ish dude with a videocam, and the other was a Spokesmodel packing a small portable tape deck. When they asked me what I liked about my job I wanted to provide a canonically cynical response, but instead I began channelling my inner Marketing VP "Bunk Ra", and ended up fading into the aether as Bunk Ra started spinning buzzwords at the blankly nodding crowd.

When I came to, my face was on the NCI web site. Go figure. I've included a picture from the web site.

For the record, I don't know what an AV Engineering Team is, but I do do graphics. I also work on JavaScript interpreters, widgets, porting kits, and thirty other things. In my group, ya get a chance to play around. (That's a good thing.) In reality, I'm good at writing software for systems that can't tolerate bloat. And they're right about something up there, I do love shipping units. Volume, volume, volume.

I used to work at Synaptics, a medium-sized company located in San Jose, California involved in making Touchpads and researching all sorts of cool stuff. There were a couple patents involved....but skip that. What you want to know is this:

By far the silliest thing I ever did at Synaptics was to create the Incomparable, Mysterious Synaptics MoodPad,a cool little display hack that does a simulation of what your touchpad might look like if it had that sort of liquid-crystal surface. That is, if you press your finger on the upper-right corner of the real touchpad, an area on the upper-right of the screen will progress from black to brown to red to yellow to green to blue to black again... and over time it will fade back to black.

Being the silliest thing I've done to date for Synaptics, it is also the most popular. Here is a quote from PC LapTop magazine, March 1997, p. 49:

Throwbacks to the '70s will enjoy the MoodPad program, found by clicking on the TouchMeter icon in the Taskbar. While there's no good reason for MoodPad, or the extra Pressure Graph program, watching blobs of color appear and change on the screen will take you on a trip to those more psychedelic times when we wore faux silver rings on our fingers inviting perfect strangers to gauge our moods.

I used to work at Franklin Electronic Publishers,which is also a very neat place. They make handheld electronic reference devices, dictionaries, encyclopedias, thesauri, stuff like that. I did software development on a number of their products, and I'm told (as of late 1997) that a good bit of my code is still shipping. Not bad--I left there in 1991!

I have a draft resume on line, but it may or may not be up to date, feel free to enquire.