January 31, 2000. New year, new century, new millennium, new life. I've
retired. Canyon country, here I come. Watch this space...
I returned to California from Utah early in 2001. Who knows what the future holds.
My former life...
I've had several careers. In my last professional incarnation, I was writing and producing documents for the Electronic Assembly Development Center at Hewlett Packard in Palo Alto, California. Writing has always been lurking as a main interest behind my other careers.
Before burning out, my main career was in the Database Technology Department at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, researching object-oriented data models. We developed the Iris prototype object-oriented database system, precursor to Hewlett-Packard's OpenODB/Odaptor. The Pegasus project was a follow-on, extending Iris to support interoperability of heterogeneous database systems.
Before that, there was a long stint at IBM. Before that came degrees in Chemical Engineering and Math.
I was a founder and first chairman of the ANSI X3H7 committee on Object Information Management, and served as acting chair of the ANSI/SPARC DBSSG Object-Oriented Database Task Group. Other activities include ANSI X3H2 (Database) and IFIP TC2.6 (Data Bases), as well as the Object Management Group (OMG), serving on their Technical Committee, Object Model Subcommittee, and Database Special Interest Group.
I wrote the book Data and Reality, and many papers in the areas of data analysis and design, conceptual schemas, entity-relationship models, the relational data model, and object technology -- as well as some non-technical writing.
What do I like? Writing, photography, canyon country, Tai Chi, drumming, skiing, rafting, and a few other things. You might also check Some of My Favorite Things.