I'm retired, and have been for many moons. Coding, particularly in Ruby, is for me a hobby.

I was born two years to the day before the Pacific theatre of World War II formerly ended with the signing of documents aboard the USS Missouri.

I grew up in Southern California, went to Berkeley as an undergraduate then moved on to UCLA where I got a Ph.D. My wife and I moved to Canada in 1970, where we have been since.

In my working life I was, chronologically, a university prof, a government policy advisor, an independent consultant, and a software developer.

The last of these was the result of an idea I had in 1990 for a remote computer backup system. The concept was to transfer each distinct file but once, even if the file was owned by multiple users (as was the case for program files, which at the time accounted for the lion's share of the occupied space on users' hard drives). This would result in it being highly economic to perform automatic nightly backups with the technology available at the time (14400 bps modems).

I hired three young coders and we set about writing a DOS app in C. After some ups and downs I licensed the software to a company that moved it from DOS to Windows and then to the internet. A few years later they were acquired by a US software giant.

My wife, Cynthia, and I live in Victoria, British Columbia (Canada). We have one living son and four grandchildren. My current avatar shows what I looked like when I was a young man.

I can be reached at my_first_name>@my_last_name.com .