I am a computer programmer with 30 years of experience in human-computer interfaces, computer graphics, scientific programming and programming languages.

For the past several years I have been working, at least part-time, on a sabbatical research project: a visual programming language and environment called Thyrd. Thyrd is being implemented using Poet, an object-oriented extension to Tcl/Tk I've been working on sporadically since 1997 and have recently released as open source. I have recently returned to consulting under the name Thyrd Informatics and am currently developing a web application using Drupal for a researcher at San Diego State University.

I was a Sr. Systems Architect for the Automated Molecular Imaging Group at The Scripps Research Institute half-time for two years, with the other half of my time spent working on Thyrd. Before that, I was the IT Director for the Neurosciences Institute for 11 years. Prior to that I was one of the founding members of the scientific visualization lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Way back in the 1980's I ported Dungeon Master to the Amiga for FTL Games. I also worked in two labs at UCSD: the Quantitative Morphology Lab with Robert B. Livingston and the Cognitive Science Lab with Donald Norman. My complete curriculum vitae can be found here.

Throughout my career I have also served as a teacher, most recently for UCSD Extension. A page about the courses I've written and taught is here. The full course notes for each of the courses are provided.

My research interests include visual and end-user programming, scientific visualization, and biologically-inspired computing (evolutionary programming, artificial life, agent-based systems, neural networks, etc.). I'm inspired by systems like Self, Squeak, Boxer, and, strangely enough, Befunge.

My favorite programming language for actually getting work done is Tcl/Tk. I've also been doing a lot of work in Java lately, and haven't forgotten too much of C/C++.