HOMETOWN:   Gowrie, IA
BORN:  March 21, 1947
CURRENT RESIDENCE:  Livermore, CA

In 1971 I married Clare Adams, who grew up in Boulder, Colorado. We have three children. Our oldest, Adam, is working on his Ph.D. in plant genetics at the University of California at Davis. Our daughter, Ashley, graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara in Dramatic Arts/Production and is currently working in stage management and casting at Disney Entertainment. She has a son named Liam. Our youngest, Jacob received his Master's Degree in computer graphics from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He currently works for Tippet Studios in Berkeley, a company that does special efects for movies.  Clare is currently a mentor teacher in the Tracy, California Unified School District, teaching seventh grade Core (English and Social Studies). Her first teaching job was as an English teacher at Brighton High School (in Colorado) where she had one of Mrs. Barstead's children as a student.

After high school, I went to the University of Denver for one quarter, intending to become a television director. However, due to a fleeting love interest and a change of major to anthropology, I transferred to the University of Colorado, Boulder for the second semester of my freshman year.

I spent the summer of 1966 on an archeological dig at Mesa Verde National Park, working on the excavation of the Great Kiva that had recently been discovered. Upon completion we had to re-cover the ruins since there was no money to restore them, and they would deteriorate if left open. They remain covered to this day, as I discovered a few years ago when I took my family to visit the park.

At the University of Colorado I changed my major several times, finally settling on English literature. However, I left college from 1969 to 1971 to work on the Crisis Unit at Fort Logan Mental Health Center in Denver. Mr. Eslinger's wife also worked at Fort Logan at the time and I had the opportunity to work with her a few times. During the latter part of my time there, I worked on a National Institute of Mental Health study on bereavement, working with families who had experienced a sudden death.

When I returned to the University of Colorado I completed my undergraduate degree in English, and was accepted to graduate school in Biology, where I completed my Masters and Ph.D. concentrating in vertebrate ecology. My major professor, Dr. Williams, was Mr. Lemieux's professor when he had gone back for special training in the early 1960s. I ran into him one day when he dropped by her office to visit. While in graduate school I worked on several environmental impact studies for proposed dams in western Colorado and also worked with the Center for Disease Control on the transmission vectors of Colorado Tick fever in Rocky Mountain National Park.

In graduate school I had picked up computer programming, and the semester before graduating a non-profit organization affiliated with the university hired me to provide an interface between crop geneticists and the computer scientists building the National Plant Germplasm System for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I pulled together and chaired the first seven crop advisory committees and also gained practical experience with computer databases and systems analysis. This was followed by a project with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Pesticide Programs, helping them understand how to move their re-registration processes to database technology.

Tired of consulting in Washington D.C. (while still living in Colorado), in 1984 I read the book What Color is Your Parachute, changed direction again, and took a job with a supercomputer company in Saint Paul, Minnesota in the area of product marketing. I gained experience with both computer architecture/technology concepts and business management/contract negotiations. In 1989 I was recruited to California by Amdahl Corporation to help market their open systems products. In 1994 as Director of Open Systems Strategy for Amdahl I encountered the emerging web technology and became enamored with its possibilities.

For over a decade application of web technologies became my focus. I championed the adoption of web technologies internally at Amdahl and am credited with coining the term Intranet in the process. My writing and conceptualizations about using web technology were widely quoted, translated into several languages and used in classes at Harvard and Stanford. In addition to North America, I consulted with companies in Europe, Japan and even went to Kazahkstan twice.

In 1998 I accepted a position with Giga Information Group, a company that advised organizations on most aspects of applying information technology to business. I developed a methodology for auditing web sites (public or intranet) against standards and effective web practices. It was used by large companies for everything from understanding competitive situations, to developing functional specifications for web sites, to managing design and implementation teams to make sure they built what the business owners intended. In 2003 Forrester Research bought Giga. They had a service that reviewed web site designs that they perceived as too close to what my service did, so in the fall of 2003 I left and began offering my service as an independent company.

In 2005 I decided to return to my academic roots and began teaching in the California Community College System. Since then I have been teaching Anatomy and Physiology, Human Biology, and non-majors General Biology.

Back to the standard form:

DO YOU REMEMBER ME?  I remember many of you, even though I can't seem to find my year book to refresh my memory. I had it not long before I wrote this because we were comparing it with my daughter's.
ARE YOU MARRIED:   Yes    (&)     HOW LONG:  37 yrs
HOW MANY TIMES:  1
HOW MANY KIDS:  3: Adam , Ashley, and Jacob
HOW MANY GRANDKIDS: One: Liam
WHERE ALL HAVE YOU LIVED SINCE SCHOOL:  Colorado, Minnesota, California
WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING: Teaching, Consulting, and Training
WHO WAS YOUR BIGGEST CRUSH IN SCHOOL:  Don't remember
FAVORITE SUBJECT: Speech
LEAST FAVORITE SUBJECT:  Math
FAVORITE TEACHERS: Mr. Nagel, Mr. Ambrose
DO YOU SMOKE:    No
DO YOU DRINK: No - not alcohol that is.
FAVORITE SOFT DRINK: Green tea (particularly White Monkey Paw) and Puer tea (which is an aged tea).
FAVORITE TYPES OF MUSIC: Finger style and classical guitar. Favorite groups and artists include: LA Guitar Quartet, Pierre Bensusan, Laurence Juber, Peppino D'Agostino, Alex  De Grassi...
FAVORITE COLORS:  teal, maroon
FAVORITE SPORT TO WATCH: Don't watch many sports
FAVORITE TIME OF YEAR:  Spring
FAVORITE FOOD: fresh tuna steak - very rare, fried zuchini
FAVORITE MOVIE YOU HAVE SEEN RECENTLY or FAVORITE TYPES OF MOVIES:Lord of the Rings, Lost In Translation, The Big Fish, Once Upon a Time In Mexico, and Harry Potter. Also oldies like: The Magic Christian, The President's Analyst, Dr. Strangelove, and the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Mummy collections. I also liked Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, even if some critics didn't. But then I was a big fan of the original five book trilogy as well as his Dirk Gentley's Wholistic Detective Agency books.
FAVORITE TOWN TO CHILL IN:  Santa Barbara or Mendocino
FAVORITE ICE CREAM:  Dreyer's Fudge Tracks, or, my homemade banana, pistachio, dark chocolate chunk combination
FAVORITE WEBSITE:  Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization, http://www.hyperorg.com/
DREAM CAR:  Toyota Prius
WHAT TYPE OF CAR WAS YOUR 1st CAR: '49 Mercury
TYPE OF CAR YOU DRIVE NOW: Toyota Prius and Honda Odyssey
PETS:   3 cats (Max, Zoe, and Bear)
TOOTHPASTE:  Colgate Total
HAVE YOU EVER GONE SKINNY DIPPING:   Not since high school
WHAT IS YOUR BAD TIME of DAY:  mid-afternoon
MOST HUMILIATING MOMENT:  I'm good at selective memory.
WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR IN THE OPPOSITE SEX: Friendship, support, affection
WOULD YOU ENJOY HEARING & KEEPING  IN TOUCH W/CLASSMATES:  Yes