BitLizard’s Blog

What a great pleasure it was to meet with some of my very old and special friends this past week. We are talking “long acquaintance” here …  high school and garage band days. My friend Jim – I think its been something like 26 years since I’ve seen him. His brother Ken, bass player for the band, and one of my favorite people of all time. Why has it been 15 years since I’ve talked to Ken? Steve is my life insurance agent (and brother to our drummer). So we manage to keep in touch. And Paul … who I’ve known since back far enough that our first meeting is lost in that grey misty area of the deep past … Paul is in my MSN Live Messenger chat list! But I bet prior to our little reunion last week it had been several years since we traded messages.

Where does the time go? Why don’t I devote real time to keeping in touch with the people who mean the most to me… those where the emotional ties run bone deep. Its definitely perverse in a way. Its that “Important, but not Urgent” category of life’s task list that is so hard to get right. Obviously, this is the reason that sites like Facebook and MySpace are the social phenomenon that they are, providing us an easy way to maintain a connection that your busy life my not otherwise offer much time for.

So Ken, still the most extraordinary cook out this collection of Village Inn Pancake House alumni, broke out the Rib Eye’s and the NY Strips, organized a baked potato bar, threw together a delicious green salad and fed us a great meal on the back porch of his house in the foothills. It was one of the most happy and interesting evenings I’ve had in many years. Thanks, guys. It was great catching up with everyone.

It was with a deep melancholy and, let’s face it, just plain ol’ Rocky Mountain home sickness, that I trudged back at the Denver airport for the trip home. And I confess that when it was looking like Frontier Airlines was going to bump me from their only flight of the day to Orlando, I wasn’t all that upset. One more day in big sky country, granite and pine… there are a lot worse places to be stranded.

Childhood, Family and Friends, My Life Denver, friends

My Land Rover LR3 is in the shop for repair for a computer crashing problem (yes, oh the irony of that). Basically after driving awhile and perhaps tapping on the brakes all the idiot lights come on at once – transmission fault, brake fault and suspension fault. The suspension fault is actually the most worrisome. The LR3 suspension is a modern miracle. But when the computer is crashed the ride in the LR3 goes from “Modern Luxury Vehicle” down to “62 Rambler with no shock absorbers”. So at first they thought it was my old battery so they replaced it. But when I went to pick it up I didn’t get even a mile away from the dealership before the computer crashed. So I took it back in. Now they are saying that its the compressor for the suspension that’s gone bad. That’s a warranty service so while I’m annoyed that I’m losing my vehicle for another couple of days at least its not costing anything.

But it should be done by now. I called my service writer there this morning and, lo and behold, “she is no longer with us”. I hope that means she was layed off or something! So I left a message with the sole remaining service writer there in order to find out what is going on. I suspect that replacing the compressor, which may or may not have been needed, is NOT going to fix the problem. This is the problem with computer hardware glitches in general.  For some reason people find it hard to believe that the computer hardware can be acting up. Its oh so much easier to blame the software (heh heh… said the computer programmer).

Except for the pausity of progress reports, Land Rover’s customer service is quite good. This particular dealership shoulders the extra (and enormous) burden of also being a Jaguar dealer. My LR3 floats in a veritable sea of misbehaving Jaguars when I take it in there. So I cut them some slack. And they are happy to give me a rental car from Enterprise whenever they keep the rover for an extended period. Today’s car is a Chevy Malibu.

Gazing at the car from a ways away I initially thought they might be giving me a Lexus. But soon I saw the Chevy logo on the front and that dispelled that notion. The Mailbu is a good looking car from the outside – a sleek sedan with the classic looks. Inside we are looking at something a lot more basic that a Lexus or a Mercedes. But the seats are very comfortable, the stereo decent and the ride to this non-car-guy is as smooth and luxurious as any Lexus or Mercedes. Thousands upon thousands of dollars less, of course. The only unfortunate thing about the Malibu is that the engine sounds anemic and squirelly when at high revs. The engine certainly has plenty of pep but it definately needs some throaty near-subsonic bass tones when you are pouncing on the gas pedal to make it feel even more like one of those other super expensive luxury cars.

Unfortunately I will never be able to buy one, it turns out. My Detroit-born wife with her storied family history in the car business with Chrysler and yes, even Chevrolet, considers the Chevy to just be too boring to even warrant our consideration. So all I can do is just wistfully enjoy my rental while I have it. Linda makes all the car decisions in the family.

My Life cars, Chevy Malibu, Land Rover

One of the benefits of being a minor mover and shaker in the early days of personal computers is that I got to personally meet a number of people now considered legends. My path crossed with Bill Gates of Microsoft fame a number of times. I had a product named “Show Partner“, a graphical presentation program for MSDOS which was like the eccentric (and possibly senile) grandfather to modern programs such as Microsoft Powerpoint. But it was a compelling enough application in those days to win a bundle deal with the Microsoft Mouse.

In fact, the Brightbill-Roberts business in those days was chiefly centered around turning these Mouse Show Partner users into full-on Show Partner F/X users at $300 a pop. I think it was around 1986 or so when IBM attempted to increase its dominance of the pc market by introducing its PS/2 line of computers. The PS/2 line had a number of enhancements not the least of which was drastically better graphics capability. As you might imagine given the sort of program I was authoring, this was a very big deal for me. But, try as we might, we could not get IBM to disclose the technical details to us for its new computers. We were a direct competitor to one of their own products — Storyboard. And perhaps that coupled with our small size made us beneath consideration in IBM’s eyes.

Enter Microsoft. They were working away on making sure everything in the mouse box would work with the new PS/2 line. Without disclosure, the update to Show Partner was going to be coming in well after the PS/2’s release. So began my short but (I’d like to think) illustrious career at Microsoft. I resigned from my own company and hired on at Microsoft after the attorneys had reviewed everything. I lived out of the Residence Inn in Redmond for 3 months, flying back to Syracuse every once in awhile when circumstances dictated I had to be there. And I feverishly worked on adding support for the additional “VGA” graphics modes of the PS/2.

Long story short… a fully updated Show Partner shipped with the new Microsoft Mouse on the same day the first PS/2 computer shipped. IBM’s own Storyboard update did not ship for another month after that… the schmucks. Ah, yes. Glory days.

So during this period there were 5 buildings on the Microsoft campus with, I think, 2 or 3 more under construction. I remember attending a full Microsoft company meeting in a high school gymnasium (yes, the entire company fit inside at the time) where I was referred to as “half an employee” by Bill in his speech… as in “and the hardware department has now grown to 9 and a half employees (heh heh)”; an inside joke about my coming to work there as an end-around IBM’s stonewalling.

I met with Bill Gates several times while working there and a few times after leaving the company, returning to my own fledgling firm. It must be tough being Bill – he is invariably going to be the smartest guy in any room he walks into. Not to mention the richest. Its going to be difficult for anyone to relate to him as a peer in any given situation. Certainly I did not consider myself to be his peer in programming, business or anything else. Ha! Except maybe in poker. I think Steve Brightbill actually came out on top in a poker game that included Bill at a trade show in San Diego one year. Steve was extremely proud of that as I recall.

Bill Gates also had some behaviors that I now associate with mild autism or Aspergers syndrome. The rocking and repetitive movements while concentrating, for example. These behaviors always seem to come part and parcel with super-extraordinary intelligence, at least among those few geniuses I’ve had the good fortune to meet. On the other hand, Bill was reasonably extroverted and gregarious. And he is and was a fine public speaker. Witness his recent stunt of releasing a swarm of mosquitos into an auditorium as part of his TED speech on malaria. These traits are very un-Aspergers like. So I definitely consider Bill Gates to be one of a kind — all the good stuff and none of the downside.

In the final days of Brightbill-Roberts & Co., as things were starting to come unglued, I went back to the Redmond campus on my return from Seoul where I had been helping a company translate HyperPAD into Korean Hangul. I stopped off to interview for the post of managing the multimedia department there. But as I talked with the programmers there I realized I really had no insight into the stuff they were working on. Microsoft Windows was making my existing programming skills obsolete and I didn’t know a filter graph from a hole in the ground. But the trip was not at all a waste of time as I got to pay a final visit to all the friends I had made at Microsoft over the years. I have many fond memories of my time there.

My Life, Programming and IT Bill Gates, Microsoft

In 1968 my father, with a freshly minted college degree, took a new job in the Denver area as a computer programmer. Moving from Albuquerque to Denver was a big change for the entire family, but a much larger change for my mother. She had lived her entire life in Albuquerque with a brief sojourn in Newfoundland while my father was in the Air Force. That was where I was born by the way, in St. John’s. In leaving Albuquerque more or less for good, my mother was also leaving her own mother and father behind as well as nearly all of her other relatives and friends. It was a big deal.

Settling in at the Ramada Inn on West Colfax for the first week as we waited for our new house to be available, it all became too much for my mother one night. My dad came into the kid’s room and told me he was taking my mother to the hospital. She was having some sort of anxiety attack. At 12, and the oldest, I was therefore in charge until their return. I spent about 5 minutes fretting about this and my mother’s status before falling promptly back to sleep. You can only expect so much from a 12 year old.

In time, we left the Ramada and moved into our house in the northern Denver suburbs, just a block shy of the Thornton city line. From my perspective, life in Denver was a vast improvement. There were no sand storms to withstand, no tumbleweeds to dodge, and grass actually grew on the lawn without much prompting. In Albuquerque our yard was mostly sand, front and back. With sodding after sodding, we never managed to get grass to take hold in that sand and clay for more that a few seasons.

Our neighborhood was far more affluent than where we lived in Albuquerque, though still solidly middle-class in nature. The local elementary school was again within walking distance and there were great new places to explore on my bicycle. One of my favorite places was a small roller skating rink about a mile from the house. Outside the building was a Coke machine that kept the pop so cold that it was partially frozen. There was nothing that could beat that particular treat when you were hot and sweating from riding up and down the roller coaster bike trails of Welby hill.

In my first five years of school in Albuquerque, I was decidedly at or near the top of my class is nearly every endeavor. My first year of school in Denver, the 6th grade, was decidedly different. I found myself playing catch-up in some subjects and school actually became a challenge for the first time. I remember in particular having great difficulty with Spanish class. You would think that coming from Albuquerque, with daily exposure to the language, I would have some good Spanish skills under my belt already. But the words I knew were mostly schoolyard taunts and profanity and, unfortunately, those words were not on the tests. It also didn’t help that the Spanish teacher was a humorless and stern task master. And in Spanish class there was far more effort required outside of the classroom than in any other class.

So I struggled and struggled, barely achieving a passing grade in Spanish by year-end. Its interesting to me that my Spanish teacher and that class are my only real recollections I have of that school year. It was my wake-up call, I guess. I recall seeing a tear in my Spanish teacher’s eye as we said goodbye at the end of the year. The following year would see me at the junior high. I guess he really wasn’t as stern and tough as I thought he was.

Having a very competitive nature (ha, my wife would laugh at that understatement), I was able to close the gap in time and get back to the top, briefly, before the disaster of puberty struck and all hell broke loose. Ah, but that’s a different story…

Childhood, Family and Friends, My Life, Places Albuquerque, Denver, family

Earlier this month I attended a business meeting in Albuquerque, a city I lived in from the age of 1 year old to about 12. My memories from when I was 12 are predictably spotty. But I *do* remember enough that I have an idea of the layout of the city. Or rather the center-city. The boundaries of the metro area have expanded significantly in 40 years. I remember my aunt and uncle (and my cousin who taught me piano) as living on a dirt road on the outskirts of town. Now that road is paved and surprising (to me at least) close to the city center. I purposely stayed at a hotel on Coors Blvd because I knew that we lived little more than a block west of that. But as the week progressed and I became familiar with the area, I realized that the terrain was not what I remembered. Checking Google I discovered that what I remember as Coors Blvd is now named “Old Coors Road SW”.

Here in no particular order are the highlights of what I remember of my childhood in Albuquerque:

1. The sand storms, oh the same storms! We lived on the West Mesa and the wind would whip up the sand so much that I would walk backwards to school so that my face would not get sand-blasted off. But walking backwards sure made it hard to dodge the tumbleweeds.

2. Chasing lizards in the fields to the west of our neighboorhood (now an area of high density housing) and my brother stomping on the wrong tumble weed. A swarm of angry bees erupted from the weed with mayhem on their little minds. I ran fast and managed not to get stung. David, however, was not so lucky and must of had 20 bites on his face and hands.

3. The only thing worse than getting hit by a tumbleweed while walking backwards to school, is seeing one roll by on fire!

4. Smoking bubble gum cigars.

5. Spending every 0.12 cents I ever got on the next Batman comic book.

6. Going to church in the desolate wasteland of Montgomery Blvd., with nothing else around for miles, seemingly. Now this area is very densely populated. Where did the arroyo go?

7. Going to grandma’s house on Lomas – now considered a “combat zone” from what I hear.

8. The yearly pow-wow at which I had to perform with my elemetary school class.

9. Going to the Bernalillo Indian reservation for pinion nuts,  jumping beans and shopping for crafts. Man what a beat place that was. Now I hear there are casinos there and the reservation is rich. Sheesh.

10. The muddy Rio Grande… ok some things never change.

11. Riding the Southwest Santa Fe railroad train (where my grandfather worked) from Belen back into town. My favorite entertainment from those days. I saw a picture of the train station terminal building in a travel brochure while I was there. It looks absolutely unchanged from what I remember. They must be preserving it as a historical building.

12. Performing a backflip dismount at the apogee of a swing on the swing set of West Mesa Elementary School. I think I got in trouble for this when the feat was witnessed by the principal and it earned me a month of schoolyard cleanup duty.

We moved to Denver in 1968 which was a much different kettle of fish.

Childhood, My Life Albuquerque, family, travel