Five Things
2007-01-03 21:43 | Permanent Link | General, People, LocativeTagged by Sean ... and having read James, GeoMullah, Mikel, and others, I guess I'll play the "Five Things" game..
- I learned how to program in 1971, using a made-up machine language that my math teacher used as an introduction to programming. Once we could do that, we got to move up to FORTRAN on punched cards. Along the way I've learned COBOL, PDP-11 Assembler, C, Algol, Scheme, elisp, C, Ada, C++, Tcl, Java, and Python.
- My first car was a Peugeot 304
convertible. I learned how to drive a stick from the guy who sold it to
me. Between my junior and senior year in high school, my friend Mike
and I drove it across Germany to Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland
and back. Mine started out red, but I painted it a bold lime green. It
was a blast! Driving is still one of my favorite activities. Preferably a nice, winding "B" road.
- I met my wife, Patty, at a mixer at MIT (they were called "Strats Rat" back then for "Stratton Center Rathskeller" - the drinking age was 18...). We've been married for 27 years.
- I received the "Kenneth D. Gardels" award in 2000 for having instigated the OGC's web mapping testbed and led the development of the WMS 1.0 spec with the help of about 20 amazing people from many GIS companies
- I have never actually used a GIS to do anything useful. I got started in mapping in ca. 1992 on a project called "MATT" - a Tcl/Tk and C/C++ client server system for military transportation planning. Then I moved into interoperability and OGC projects. After that, NASA, CEOS WGISS, EOGEO, and MIT. Believe it or not, I do vaguely remeber buying a copy of Manifold at $75.00 when it first came out. But I don't remember getting it to do anything.
[Update - I had originally said a Peugeot 204 but it was a 304... so much for those brain cells]
