Step Into the Way-Back Machine...

My mother used to tell a story about the first day I went to kindergarten. I stepped off the bus and said, "I'm not going back there ever again!" When she asked why, I said, "Because they haven't taught me how to read yet!"

When I went to grade school, they had two libraries, one for the first through third graders and one for the fourth through sixth graders. By the middle of second grade I had read all of the science books in the first library. For some stupid reason, they wouldn't let me go to the other library till I was in fourth grade. So, I started going to the public library. I practically lived in that place. All the librarians knew me by name. I read everything I could get my hands on that had anything to do with science or how to do practically anything, plus lots of science fiction. I'm not saying I was a prodigy or anything. There were always a few kids who got better grades than me. I guess I just cared more about the "big picture."

High-school was the absolute worst time of my life. Let's just leave it at that.

When I went to college, the first time, I majored in biology in the pre-med program. I was going to be a transplant surgeon. The program was incredibly focused on chemistry and I got the feeling I was being trained to be nothing more than a dispensing arm of the pharmaceutical industry. That, compounded with the articles I was reading about doctors being sued for malpractice by the AMA for not performing unnecessary hysterectomies, really turned me off to the medical industry. I liked computers and a friend even hinted that I could transfer over to his college and get in on the ground floor of a new computer science program they were starting just for him. But I thought that actually working in computers would be nothing more than rearranging lists of data on green and white striped paper for businesses. Not a lot of foresight there, I can tell you. So, when I got a summer job fixing burglar alarms that paid more than I had ever made before I decided to just keep it and not return to school. That's right, I dropped out after 2 years with a 3.65 GPA. What the he** was I thinking?

Got married, got divorced, joined the Marine Corps and fixed electronics for four years. When I left, they asked me if they could keep my notes and diagrams. Not because they were classified any more, but because they said they were better and more understandable than what the government provided.

Work LIfe:

After the Marine Corps I got a great job working at the California Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles back in 1988. It was like a dream come true for a complete science geek like me. They told me that all my hobbies and all those books I had read about how to do stuff was what really sold them. Within three weeks they promoted me to Assistant Supervisor of the Technical Services Department. We used to say that was the department that fixed anything that did anything. While there I got the opportunity to help draw up specifications for minimum requirements for all future exhibits. I also learned a lot about designing exhibits for best educational value. But I got homesick for Kansas City and let my family convince me to move back home.

I did some electronics work then started working for a printed-circuit-board manufacturing company. After plotting film to make circuit boards for 3 years I convinced them that they needed a real network manager and that person should be me. With no real training I learned how to administer an AIX system and how to set up a Novell network. After working there for seven years with only one 3% raise I decided to move on. I got a job at some other manufacturing plant but when I was offered a position as the network manager of a small hospital, I jumped at the chance. I was able to take a network that had been going down three times a day and clean it up so that it didn't go down for over a year. But the politics got to me and I decided it was time to go back to school. I sold my house, gave away a lot of my stuff and was all set to move to Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, the home of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where the first Mosaic web browser was invented.

Love Intervenes, but Finally Back to School

Just before I moved, I met a woman and fell in love with her. She lived here in Lawrence, Kansas so I moved here instead. I couldn't afford out of state tuition rates so I planned to work for a year and establish residency. The problem was that I never made enough money to afford in-state rates either. I worked for a small computer consulting firm for a while before going off on my own. The owner said he didn't mind. He was more interested in helping his son build a new business based on one of his inventions anyway. I tell people I successfully ran a small business for three years. Then I unsuccessfully ran a small business for two years after that. The problem was that I made people's computers too darn reliable and I didn't know how to get new customers fast enough. I essentially worked myself out of a job. I lost everything: my house, my car, and most of my stuff. In the process, a friend of mine suggested that if there was ever a time to go back to school, this would be it. After being dirt poor for two years I was able to get plenty of financial aid. By the way, the woman and I are still good friends.

"What is your best skill?"

Don't you hate those kinds of questions? In every job I ever had, I was the guy who would finally get around to documenting what others had just been keeping in their heads. I was the one to work out systems of organizing information and systems for using that information. When the printed-circuit-board manufacturer bought a new enterprise-wide database and accounting system, the vendor said they would have to send a team of consultants to spend six months configuring the product to our specific needs. I did it in three weeks. While at the same time designing the floor plans of all the cubicle spaces so that we could use all the parts from the previous building most efficiently, finishing up the installation of the network, and installing the phone system. Before that I had helped with the ISO-9000 certification. At the hospital, no one knew where any of the cables went in the whole darn building. I documented and labeled everything. I just have a weird knack for organizing things and systems. Maybe it is a little bit OCD and a little bit of seeing the big picture. I don't know. But it works for me.

The Church of "What's Happening Now"

That's an old Flip Wilson reference. So here I am, 46 years old and back in school as an undergraduate. I am a computer science student, but I gotta tell ya, I'm actually getting a little sick of computers. I have been fixing the darn things for almost 30 years. The one I am typing on right now keeps beeping at me and repeating characters every few words. I think my favorite keyboard is finally going bad. OK, so it is about 17 years old now. But it's got the best quality action of any keyboard I have ever touched. Until now, I guess.

When I first started back to school I wanted to be a physicist. I was working on two majors, math and computer science. I wanted to get those degrees first, before even starting on the physics because the kind of physics I wanted to work on would require lots of math and lots of computation. But I couldn't learn the math fast enough. I was still getting 'A's but it was taking me six grueling hours almost every night to grind my way through the textbooks. Math has never been my strong suit, but this was ridiculous. Some of the explanations were so terse as to be indecipherable. So I dropped the math major and just stuck with the computer science. I was heartbroken.

And this leads us up to: How I invented DEMML™...