I live on a small farm in the Finger Lakes area of Central NY, USA and like to play with tractors and old farm equipment while my wife plays with her herding dogs.
To keep fit I bicycle and downhill ski. In 2015 I bought a Surly Disc Trucker and have ridden 2900 miles so far, with a max distance of 56 miles (my age at the time). A couple years later I bought a used Trek Madone 3.1 and have 1000 miles on that as of 2020.
In the summer of 2013 my youngest son expressed interest in joining a local FIRST LEGO League team. I tagged along to see what it was about and if I could help. I volunteered to be an assistant coach, but ended up being the lead coach for the Bots of the Round Table in the Nature's Fury challenge and having a blast. The next year I coached the Hacker Catz in the World Class challenge. In 2015 I was back with the Bots of the Round Table for the Trash Trek challenge. For the Animal Allies challenge I was again with the Bots of the Round Table.
At the end of 2014 I ran into the lead mentor for the Trumansburg FIRST Robotics Competition team at a party and asked if I could help. He gratefully accepted and I obtained clearance to be an advisor at the Trumansburg High School and started coming to the practices for the Trumansburg Robot Raiders (FRC 5254) while they prepared for the Recycle Rush challenge. Robots, power tools and computers, how could I resist? It was quite a ride, this second year team made it to the finals at the Tech Valley and Finger Lakes regionals and was invited to the World Championships in St Louis. The next year the team rebranded as FRC5254: HYPE (Helping Youth Persue Excellence) and competed in the FIRST Stronghold challenge. The results were similar, we made it to the finals at the Tech Valley regional and won an award, the semi-Finals at the Finger Lakes Regional and won an award there too, and made it to the semi-finals at the World Championships. In 2017 the challenge will be Steampunk and we are looking forward to what that will bring.
During my first season I was asked to join the board of Trumansburg Robotics, Inc a NYS approved Educational charity being created to bring the FIRST experience to the Trumansburg, NY area. As secretary I've helped drive the adoption of the by-laws, conflict of interest policy and other documentations and obtain 501(c)(3) non-profit status.
After attending Clarkson University for two years I worked for the Educational Resources Center (formerly the Computing Center) installing and supporting systems, communications and networking, even overseeing connection to the fledgling Internet.
I moved to the Cornell University Theory Center in 1987 as chief developer on the Gated project. In addition I provided support of the phase I NSFnet project. Since the Merit-run NSFnet took over I focused mostly on Gated. In 1991 the Gated project moved to the Advanced Technologies and Planning group of the Network Resources division of Cornell Information Technologies in support of the campus backbone and I followed. In 1995 CIT realized that the Gated project could be managed better elsewhere and transferred it to Merit.
I joined Berkeley Software Design, Inc. as a Member of Technical Staff shortly after the Gated project left Cornell. There I worked on quite a number of different projects including re-writing system daemons, integrating external software, debugging the BSD kernel, integrating the HARP ATM stack.
I joined Wind River Systems,Inc. as part of an acquisition of the BSD/OS and FreeBSD groups of Berkeley Software Design in May of 2001. BSD/OS stayed around for a few years; eventually Wind River realized they didn't know how to sell and market it. I took a short break managing VxWorks filesystems and then moved on the the fledgling Linux team, moving from managing BSP development to build system, toolchain and development infrastructure and eventually being in charge of day-to-day operations for Wind River Linux development. During that time I learned about Agile, ISO 9001, Continuous Integration, Configuration Management among other things. I still managed to keep my hands dirty, so to speak, writing high level designs and even doing a bit of Yocto Project integration and bug fixing. Eventually Wind River started cutting remote employees and we parted ways in June of 2016.
In May of 2017 I joined AppNexus, Inc as a Senior Systems Architect supporting disagregated storage in our private cloud. Configuration Management with puppet and scripting with python and REST APIs were suplemented by a central SQL configuration database. In 2018 AT&T acquired AppNexus and merged it with AdCo to form Xandr.