All
About MeAll
About Me(This picture was taken atop Clouds' Rest in Yosemite.
I'm not quite sure why I have a rock on my head. Perhaps it slipped out.)
Rich Scire and perhaps very few others may remember me as 'THE.PRIZE'. (Mailbox only allowed upper case :-). With Talk (nemesis of Peter Defrieze and every other red-blooded american male operator) (parenthetically, this leaves out Renee) I was known as Salamir (Salamir Abalamahalamatandra Slitskins, in full.)
I worked at UMass for a little while after graduating (finally!) (with a 0.0 cum semester under my belt!), but quickly decided that Amherst was not a healthy place for me. So, with the full stupidity of youth, I got me to New Hampshire.
In New Hampshire I worked for first Honeywell Bulle, a huge corporate giant of the sort that Scott Adams likes to poke. I was working on their mail system. My project there was soon cancelled. Other projects all around me were cancelled, bang bang bang. I got quickly tired of this.
Next I tried a smaller (and warmer) newspaper publishing house in Manchester. After a year or so, there was a massive layoff. Those of you who've been through this know, it's like having half of your family die in a plane crash. I wasn't layed off, but I got a new job that day, at a small start-up in California.
The small startup was Software Transformation, Inc. They were trying to save the world from Bill Gates by developing a portability platform that worked across all operating systems. I was the main GUI guy, and the 8th employee of the company. It was a new experience for me... scrambling for cash, not sure if you were going to make payroll, eating lunch every day with the entire company... I liked it.
Then Novell (a Big Company) bought us. Our stock became valuable overnight, and we had a decent medical plan. The product was renamed Appware Foundation and Novell marketted it agressively. Both Apple and Borland were telling their customers to use it. Then Novell (a Big Company) decided that they really didn't want to do this anymore, and threw us away.
Well, to be acurate, they told us that we were the best programmers in the company, and they really wanted our talents used elsewhere. We could:
Duh....
So everyone left. Five of us took the money and started Chaco Communications (Inc.) We're developing multiplayer game software for the Internet and VRML viewers. (VRML is Virtual Reality Modeling Language.) Our main focus is MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) and we're having fun with it.
It's funny, though. I feel like I've come back around to writing talk software. Those of you with telnet might want to try my favorite. Telnet to ancient.anguish.org, port 2222:
telnet ancient.anguish.org 2222
The rest should be obvious.
So much for the employment history. I've also attended two gay rights marches in D.C., hiked the Grand Canyon twice, soaked in wild hot springs in 5 states, visited Yosemite an insane number of times, climbed Half Dome 4 times and slept on top twice, danced naked under a full moon at midnight on top of Half Dome, gone to Japan twice and stayed both times at a Nichiren Buddhist temple in Kyoto, learned to speak basic Japanese, been taken to a 'hostess bar' by NTT and sung a terrible drunken punk rendition of 'Heartbreak Hotel', shocking my hosts, bought a VW Vanagon Westfalia camper (my dream car), photographed a lot, exhibited in several galleries and a museum, and proposed to my partner in Chaco Canyon near the Anasazi house of Penasco Blanco.
Not a bad life.
Here are some URLs:
coyote@chaco.com