About

General Background

Hello everyone! I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970’s. In the sixth grade I tried my hand at music by picking up my brother’s hand-me-down clarinet. After two months practice often forgetting my instrument at home on the days of my music class, I decided to forget about a life as a musician and concentrated on BASIC programming on my Atari 800 computer. Many years and several computers later, I’m still typing away on a keyboard most hours during the week.

Long ago, I majored in Course VI at MIT. My concentration was A.I. and I worked for a semester with Henry Lieberman on programming by example research. I managed to survive and get my Bachelor’s in Computer Science and Engineering. I also minored in the History of Art and Architecture, taking some art and video editing classes along the way. This was a great break from sitting in front of an X-terminal all day long trying to figure out why my trees weren’t balancing or my graphics weren’t clipping properly.

In the 1990’s, I worked for Apple Computer. After a number of summer internships working on test automation software and the standard C library for Mac OS, I settled down after graduation into the Runtime Engineering Group. They were the ones who bring you such nifty technologies like actually loading an application into memory, shared libraries and Apple’s original implementation of Java under the Mac OS. With the return of Steve Jobs, there was a 10% reduction in force throughout Apple. This turned out to be a good thing for me as it spurred me on to travel and lead me ultimately to my most recent employers.

I currently work for a large electronics and entertainment company. After some research on in-home media access and management, I spent several years working on successful and not-so-successful presence and communication projects using XMPP. These days my work focuses on content distribution and management for specialized devices and applications.

My Life on the Web

While in college I started my own little site on anime in general and Gunbuster in particular. For a very brief time in 1995 when the web was small, I got mentioned in a few books and magazines. The quick shout out in Wired 3.08 is still available.

After college, I set up my own site and expanded to cover Forbidden Planet as well as anime topics. For a while I was debating whether or not to try to grow further towards something like the Anime Web Turnpike. As a first stepping stone I even did a quick report of Anime America 1996 for the online zine Animecca. Ultimately I stayed in the domain of just another fan. Maybe it was tiredness after work or lack of money and time to sit down and write a real databased backed service back then.

The site had a few refreshes over the years but pretty much died around 2000. It seemed a bit silly to keep trying to update static HTML by hand and remind people I’m not comic book shop in the UK. After years of a static, increasingly outdated site, I decided to revamp in as a blog like millions of others have done.

David’s Geek Code

Showing my age, I have a Geek Code:

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/>FA d-(+) s+: !g p? a-- w+ C++ UAI+ P--- L+ E(+) N+(++) K
(!)w M++$ !V Y+ t++ 5++ j R tv(+) b+ D-(----)@ e++>+++(>*)
u+(++)* h! f+ R n@ y+ o-- W++ O PS+>++ PE- PGP(+)>+++ X++ DI+ G
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Nobody uses these any more but it’s fun for nostalgia purposes.