About Me
- I currently work at Google in engineering management, where I have helped deliver some awesome products, features, and infrastructure, including Google Reader, Google Groups, Google Web Fonts, iGoogle, Google Gadgets, and a ton of other random projects that would probably bore the average reader.
- Before Google, I was Sr. Director of Engineering at EarthLink, helping build up a world class engineering team building web-based application and services. Among the cool products I was involved with were EarthLink Web Mail, EarthLink’s personalized start page (a consumer web portal that was also syndicated/cobranded for partners), My Account, etc.
- Before EarthLink, I was Vice President of Technology for Excite@Home, which was the merger of Excite and @Home (the company that brought cable modem to normal people). I was an early employee of Excite which went bankrupt along with @Home because AT&T destroyed @Home to get access to the cable modem business so it could sell the assets to Comcast. We got stuck in the middle.
- I am a serious footbag aficionado! In fact, I am the co-founder of the non-profit International Footbag Players’ Association, Inc. (a 501(c)(3) charitable corporation). If you haven’t heard of footbag, it’s a serious sport played with what’s commonly known as a Hacky Sack (actually a brand name — and the worst brand at that). One of my main goals is to help change footbag’s reputation and to highlight the athleticism of this competitive sport I play and love.
- I created and help maintain the Footbag WorldWide information service, which you should really check out if you haven’t seen it recently. Before you write me to ask me about footbag, trust me and look there first. It’s an attempt at a multi-level FAQ on every aspect of the sport. It was created to be the companion online community to the “real” footbag community that has been growing steadily for decades since footbag was invented in 1972. Today, footbag.org is owned by the IFPA, but is still run out of my house.
- I founded the Stanford Footbag Club, along with the Club’s first president, Eric Anderson, and I continue to be an active member (we practice every Tuesday afternoon at White Plaza). SUFC is the second University-sanctioned footbag club in the world (the first being the now-defunct U. C. Berkeley Footbag Club). Many new university clubs are sprouting up around the world, and I like to think our web page (which includes a constitution for anyone to copy) has been a big help to many of them. Our club used to host one of the largest and most popular footbag competitions in the world: the Western Regional Footbag Championships, attracting players from all over the U.S. and Canada every Memorial Day Weekend until 2002 when I called it quits.
- I grew up in Macon, Georgia (USA), and went to Georgia Tech for my undergraduate, and Stanford University for my Master’s degree. I majored in Computer Science at both schools, with my graduate work in Distributed Systems. I went to work at Apple Computer straight out of Stanford as a Research Scientist in operating systems, and was there for 9 years (1988 to 1997) before they shut down the department I was in.
- I am an amateur linguist, having studied at least eight languages, I can safely say I am fluent in English and French, completely conversational in Spanish, and I get by just fine in German. I have studied others (Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, and Czech), but don’t speak them well enough to get out of trouble. I can get myself beaten up in about 95 countries without the use of gestures (so send me your favorite insults)!
- One of my claims to fame: When I was 17, I wrote the radar-jamming software for the F-15 while working at TRW, Inc. in Warner Robins, GA. It was downhill from there.
