Beginning my electronics service career (that's a 1950 radio)
My wife and I live in a small condominium in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since retiring in 2002, I have been studying gardening, permaculture, and the environment. We work plots at two local community gardens and raise much of our own food.
Interests
- Gardening for self-sufficiency
- Environmental (permaculture, sustainable agriculture, end of energy, ecology)
- Simple living, voluntary simplicity
- Kayaking, bicycling, hiking, cross-country skiing
- Natural history
- History and tradition (especially in relation to the environment)
- Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Shakerism, Quakerism, and early Christianity
- Communitarian anarchism and decentralized socialism.
- Ethnic cooking, primitive technology, traditional woodworking, sewing
- Foreign languages and culture (Italian, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Greek)
- Green science fiction: Ernest Callenbach, Ursula K. Le Guin, Molly Gloss, Judith Moffett
- Science fiction writers in general from about 1948-1978: Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, Frederik Pohl, Cordwainer Smith, Gianni Rodari, Olaf Stapledon, H.G. Wells, Joe Haldeman, Stanislaw Lem, James Tipree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), Kurt Vonnegut. C.M. Kornbluth, the early Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien, Kim Stanley Robinson
- Realistic novelists (1820 - 1955), all nationalities: I.B. Singer, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, early William Saroyan, early Mario Puzo, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Gogol, Natalia Ginzburg, Ignazio Silone, B. Traven.
- The original hard-boiled detective novelists: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald (Ken Millar)
- Folk music
Previous Lives
- 1984-2002. Technical writer
- Hewlett-Packard (computer diagnostics and repair)
- Waite Group (co-author of Unix Communications and the Internet)
- Racal-Vadic (modems)
- High school teacher (English, journalism, science, math)
- Newspaper reporter (Menlo Park, San Francisco, Staten Island NY)
- Hotel desk clerk
- Winery maintenance worker
- Prop boy in a traveling circus
- Woodshop teacher
Accomplishments
- Bicycled England and Ireland on a one-speed bicycle
- Learned to walk on stilts in one afternoon
- "Most Improved" cross-country runner, San Rafael High School (Calif) 1965