There's a therapist named Robert Ornstein (no "e"), but he's someone else. When I was a kid I bought his books because our names are similar; I dreamed that one day we'd write a book together and it would be by Robert Or(e)nstein. When anyone asks me if I'm him, I tell them that there's a mnemonic aid to help remember that I'm not: If there's no "e", it isn't me. Robert Ornstein's version would go: If there's an "e", it isn't me.
In 1992, I went to Wichita, Kansas to help take down a house that had been designed by Buckminster Fuller in the 1940's. J. Baldwin took the above picture there on a day when we were tearing insulation out of the walls.
The house is due to be restored at the Henry Ford Museum and Deerfield Park sometime later this year.
I love beets, especially pickled beets. My parents have photographs of me as a big fat baby, grinning, with beet juice running down my chin.
My Past:
I grew up in Sherman Oaks, a suburb of Los Angeles. I studied computer programming at UC Berkeley, but didn't really fall in love with programming until I saw HyperCard.
Right after college, I went to work for Ingres, a relational database company, and spent ten years travelling around the US and Canada, doing corporate education. Travelling was was fun for the first five years; after that, it was sort of a drag, but I wrote some fun HyperCard programs at the same time.
During that time, I also did a number of contract programming jobs in a variety of languages: C, Pascal, Lingo, HyperCard, and a few different SQL 4GL's. I've also played a bit with Smalltalk, Scheme, Lisp, and C++, but not at all extensively.
I've been a DJ, a rafting guide, and a photographer.
I used to do a lot of volunteer work at the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and then moved on to the Computer Access Center, a group that helps people with all sorts of disabilities to use computers.
I presented a paper on A Pattern Language of an Essay-Based Web Site at PLoP '95.
My Present:
(August 1998 note: this is all quite old. I live in Alameda,
California now, working for Perforce Software. Everything below this paragraph is sort of, well, a lot of, out of date.
Sorry.
I work at Glyphic Technology, working with (and on) our new development environment, Codeworks. They hired me in September; I love this job!
(My more essay-like biography page can be read at Glyphic. It very well may read better than this one).
I teach beginning Computer Programming at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. I have only two to four students at a time, and I get to teach them programming any way I want to. It's been fun, but I won't be teaching there after December; I want to concentrate more on my Codeworks job.
I play a lot of volleyball. I'm not that great, but I'm getting better.
I live in Venice, California, but my best friends here are scattered all over Los Angeles. I wish they lived closer.
