Born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, I graduated Benjamin Franklin High School 1964, MIT 1968 in electrical engineering, and U. C. Berkeley 1972 in electrical engineering and computer science. I am retired from a 36-year career at IBM, Silicon Valley, California, most recently in EDA (electronic design automation) at the Almaden Research Center. My wife Laurie is working on a real estate development project in Flagstaff, Arizona. Our daughter lives in Montana with her husband. Our son lives in San Jose with his wife and two children.

Career

In May of my senior year at MIT, I suddenly realized that I was getting sick of school, and that perhaps going directly to grad school was not the best choice. Totally naive, I started job interviews with the very few recruiters still active on campus. I acceped my only job offer, which was with the IBM Advanced Systems Development Division laboratory in Los Gatos, California. The beautiful building with a view of the Santa Cruz Mountains looked more like a country club. It was a very creative environment. I had opportunity to work with, or at least see every day, people who invented things like the disk drive, optical bar code scanners, magnetic stripe readers, the ATM, and so on. My first task in library automation was interrupted by special invitation from the President of the United States. Drafted into the US Marine Corps, I served two years at the supply activity in Philadelphia, mostly working on a new teleprocessing application in S/360 assembly language. Upon release, I earned my MS at Berkeley, then returned to IBM. I wrote image compression and device driver software in the days when IBM pioneered the image industry. Unfortunately, IBM marketers saw little market for this exotic technology, so the world passed us by. I migrated into electronic design automation, with an early focus on VLSI when that was a novelty. I wrote logic simulation software in PL/I, and maintained the internal IBM EDA software package in which it was a component. I wrote several tools for Timing Analysis, earning a division-level achievement award. The engraved clock is nice, and I still use it. But the best part was a motivational conference in Florida with a collection of IBM's best contributors. In those days, I could book my own air travel. For less than my peers paid to present our LSM session (rated the best session of the conference), I paid the Delta Airlines system excursion fare, covering the Florida conference, the LSM conference session in New York, and tourist visits to Boston, New Orleans, Shreveport, and Bermuda. I participated in the architecture, design, and software for the Logic Simulation Machine. This concept progressed from our lab, to IBM Research, to mainline processor technology. Many generations later, it is marketed as the Cadence Quickturn emulation engine. It's probably the most powerful massively-parallel 1-bit processor ever built. The basic instruction is an arbitrary 1-bit 4-input truth table. We began implementing IBM's mainline internal grid-based detail router (for integrated circuits) on this engine. IBM lost interest and dropped funding before we could finish it. I integrated IBM's circuit simulator into the Cadence Analog Artist design environment. This afforded me the opportunity to work at Cadence sites directly with their engineers.

Web development

Much of my time is now spent on web development for several websites.

Intellectual pursuits

With the time constraint of full-time employment behind me, I have more time to read. Most is in science, and most of that in physics. How would my life have differed if I had stayed in physics at MIT instead of switching into electrical engineering? I have been active in the physics, and especially the Other - Science, sections of Yahoo Answers. My main professional membership as been in the IEEE. Membership in Mensa  and Triple Nine Society  provides opportunity for some fascinating discussions. I have enjoyed participation in the Big Ideas Reading Group, a Mensa group, and have read all the books since I started at number 6. At Valley Church, I have been studying the history and cultural context of the texts of the New Testament, and other contemporary works. I challenge doctrines based on a misunderstanding of the text, their cultural context, and ignorance of modern scholarship and textual criticism.

My political views have changed over time. In today's world, what are the best choices governments at all levels can make? They don't always match well with political party platforms. They match even less with what politicians actually do. I'm happy to engage in discussion at this level. We've seen the hazards of excessive governmental regulation, unbridled industrialism, and unwise deregulation. The US has an unprecedented opportunity to take a first step toward "doing it right" with healthcare. Will we capitalize on it? Or will we let an old-fashioned power struggle empower a repressive regime, or derail any serious effort toward reform? Idealogs on all sides are capable of arousing opposition by publicizing a distorted caricature of any proposal they don't like. Can we get beyond that kind of knee-jerk reaction this time?

Church

My involvement with Valley Church in Cupertino, California, is detailed on my page on the Valley Church Community.

Sample writings

The Gospels

Philosophical Thought and Biblical Literature with a general discussion of prophetic and apocalyptic literature in Bible text.

A review of Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe.

Background material for Leong Tan's class on the book of Revelation.

Background material for the Valley sermon series on the book of Jonah.

Viewpoint: Rip Van Winkle Awakens at DAC 2009

A brief conference report on Program for the Future.

patent 5,239,481 issued 8-24-93
patent 6,266,802 issued 7-24-01

A complete session at the IEEE International Conference on Computer Design: VLSI in Computers, October 31-November 3, 1983, Port Chester, NY, on the IBM Los Gatos Logic Simulation Machine.

Most of my professional writing is classified IBM internal, so I can't show it.

Sailing

I started sailing on Lake Pontchartrain at New Orleans, racing a 30-foot sloop with my father. Eventually he migrated to a 42-foot cruising sloop, better equipped for the Gulf of Mexico. That made my choice of inter-collegiate sport a natural one, with a JV letter in sailing for the MIT team. I could have brought that 30-foot Dragon with me to California, but I discovered that renting a slip for that boat would cost more than my house payment. Since then, my sailing has been whatever I managed to catch including the Star of India.

Other activities

Our homestead is catching up from decades of neglect. I'm turning the tide against encroaching brush, weeds, and poison oak. I keep trying to do a garden, with limited success. Our horse Samantha provides a continuous supply of fertilizer and keeps the grass mowed.

My "career" in photography started with Technique, the MIT yearbook, where I was the living groups photo editor. Most is now natural scenery, artistic composition, an occasional wedding, and work for Valley Church. Here are some samples (not representative) of my work.

Ham radio has intrigued me since junior high school. Talking (mostly in Morse Code) all over the country and the world using equipment I scrounged surplus or built myself was a big thrill. I've been licensed continuously since then, though not always active. My current license is Amateur Extra class. My favorite operating event has always been Field Day. My public service emphasis began with the Lexington Fire of July 1985. I served as the ARES Emergency Coordinator for Saratoga for several years. Our homesite was chosen partly for its excellence as a radio site, but I haven't made much use of that. I'd like to come up with a practical way to use passive circuits to control the directionality of a phased array of vertical antennas.

I enjoy travel, now mostly in my Toyota 4Runner and tent, to out-of-the-way places. Summer and fall fill the local area with weekend arts, crafts, and wine festivals. We enjoyed trailer camping with our children all around the US. Other memorable trips included Europe, Peru, and houseboating on Lake Havasu and on the Sacramento River Delta.

Puns for Educated Minds
The Wisdom of Age
Daily Questions for Success
The Mother of All Ethnic Jokes

Web site feedback to webmaster. Web hosting provided by