Hermosa Beach,
California
Around this time I remember my favorite TV shows being Split Second, a game show hosted by Tom Kennedy, and the Channel 11 ident (below). Oh yes, and Sesame Street too. And The Electric Company, I remember this in particular since it clashed with Star Trek which my Dad wanted to watch. (My Mom had to referee.) My friends wanted to watch stuff like Batman and The Brady Bunch, but I wasn't remotely interested.
Through kindergarten and the first and second grades I developed an intense interest in clocks and fluorescent lighting, spending my school days drawing pictures of clocks on my desk when I should have been listening to Mrs Navarris drilling me in Spanish: "rojo...amarillo...verde" and so on. Worse, I was packed off to summer school against my will. I remember eating peanut butter sandwiches there.
My first brush with technology came when I was about six. My Dad bought my Mom a Commodore hand-held calculator for her birthday. It cost $9.99, plus tax, and had a six-digit, fixed-decimal LED display. I was deeply fascinated. My Mom was not impressed. "You can balance the checkbook with it," my Dad said. My Mom didn't speak to him for a few hours, as I recall...but she did balance the checkbook with it eventually, and when she wasn't doing that the calculator was one of my favorite playthings. I even remember how it smelled...getting a bit crazy here, slow down Kev, sloooooow down...pets included a series of goldfish all named Leaky. The last one survived five years. Another one, the first one I think, had a companion named Happy, who unhappily died in a matter of weeks. I also had a tortoise named Tommy, who was apparently stolen. I don't know. Sometimes I wonder.
The Channel 11 ident, c.
1975
A few people went overboard and displayed them in several places. One house, I recall, had 575 displayed in at least three places: on the eaves of the roof, on the porchlight, and (honestly) designed into a wrought-iron railing on the porch. If I remember correctly the lady of the house was an Avon representative (maybe Amway too, I'm not sure). Perhaps the delivery trucks kept missing their house. I don't know.
When I was eight it was decided that I would fare better outside the public school system and for the next six years I was educated at home, by my parents. We acquired, or rather were acquired by, another cat which I named Paradise. For much of this time my Dad was working nights and so we had our Main Meal at two in the afternoon while watching CNN. While munching on chicken, baked cod, my Mom's fabulous lasagna, or whatever, we sat through the Falklands war, the entire John DeLorean cocaine trial, the declaration of martial law in Poland, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the civil war in El Salvador, the death of Leonid Brezhnev, the death of Yuri Andropov, the American invasion of Grenada, etc. etc. etc. interspersed with cheesy commercials for mail-order kitchen wares. For some reason, nobody but me seems to remember the commercial, warning against the hazards of cheap plastic mixing bowls, that featured a fish sticking out of a birthday cake.
At fourteen I figured it might be a good idea to rejoin mainstream society and went off to high school. I went on to do a B.A. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. This included a year at the University of Birmingham, in England. Contrary to popular wisdom in the UK, Birmingham is in fact a nice city. After that I worked in London for a few years. For the most part I lived in Clapham, when it was on the brink of trendiness. When I moved there in 1993, the high street featured £1 shops and most of the pubs in the area were quiet, as old and unfashionable as their clientele. There was a cafe called The Majestic that had black pudding on the menu, which is not easy to find in London. By the time I left in 1996 all but one of the old pubs had been redecorated, transformed into loud, wine-and-bottled-beer kind of places, and it was not long before the Majestic and anything like it was gone.
The mainstay of my social life in London, frankly, was after-work booze-ups. They were very enjoyable booze-ups, though, and I made a number of friends, which are almost as hard to find in London as black pudding. Saturdays, more often than not, meant a hung-over shoppng trip to Clapham High Street, Brixton, or Oxford Street. After a while we were even able to do this on Sundays too, after the Sunday trading laws were relaxed in 1995. After a few years I was ready to leave, but now I miss London sometimes. I miss living a city where you have something approaching the variety of Los Angeles, but all explorable on foot.
Back to SchoolIn September 1996 I came to the University of Wales, Aberystwyth and embarked on an M.Sc. course in Computer Science. Technically, I lived at the student village, Pentre Jane Morgan (right) but in fact I lived in the Comp. Sci. Department's "Sun Lounge", so called because that is where many of the Sun SPARC workstations resided. Here I passed my time programming in:
Ada, a language rather like your neighbour with the immaculate front lawn who you can always trust to look after the cat while you're off for ten days in Waikiki.
C, your vivacious but batty friend. If you ask C to look after the cat while you're off sunning yourself, and tell her to feed it "Kit Kat" when you meant to say "Kit-e-Kat", she will faithfully feed chocolate bars to your feline, even going to the trouble of chopping them up into small bits and mixing them with milk. It is, after all, what you told her to do. And C will never take out the garbage. But what the hell, C is a lot more fun, especially if you're careful and write "beautiful" C. You get more of an ego boost when you write a good C program. You could go on a real bender with C on a sunny afternoon in the backyard with some tequila, some Instant Margarita mix, ice and a blender...Ada would really be much happier with a cup of tea and some digestive biscuits.
Java, now something of a celebrity. At the time, Java was the kid next door with long hair and a pierced eyebrow who's really into the Offspring, and seems reliable enough to look after the cat, but nobody wants to chance it.
I returned to my native land on September 30, 1997 and began my career as a Java developer. I became a member of the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles. I rediscovered skateboarding at the grand old age of 29, which landed me in the emergency room.
I discovered Los Angeles for the first time, in a way. Growing up we rarely ventured far from the beach, but now I roam all over the place. In 2001 I met my dear Dave, who has among other things helped me to appreciate modern art, the desert, and rotisserie chicken.
These days I seem to be devoting as much attention to the process of software development as development itself. I admire well-designed, stable software, and work to head off crises that distract developers and others from the real job at hand. In movies you see computer geeks working furiously into the night, spinning around from one terminal to the next on swivel chairs, but I have never found that model to be conducive to building reliable software. My dream is to build a workplace in which software developers are relatively free of crises and can devote themselves to solving problems, with plenty of space, comfortable furniture, decent hardware, and quiet places to talk and think.
When I'm not trying to build a better workplace, I divide my time between my home in Los Angeles and Palm Desert. And I stop by to see Dad once or twice a week.
"I must have been born under an unlucky star. You know, I filled out entry blanks for every single drawing in the supermarket for the last twelve years, and the only thing I ever won was a coupon for a small little jar of tomato paste. But they were out of tomato paste, and by the time they got more in, my coupon had expired."
-- Mary Hartman
last updated January 12, 2008