Hardware engineering degree immediately converted to software upon graduation from college, 1981; longest held position as lone VMS specialist in a UNIX shop, doing porting/maintenance/testing on a large multilayered dynamic data visualization and control package, DataViews.

Last position as software engineer: Windows Websphere e-billing package, me as sole tester using Perl to develop record/playback gadget to find bugs. I loved finding bugs and writing bug reports, little technical poems.

All along, a traditional music player, New England and Northern European fiddle tunes on a baroque recorder; also contra dancing, which I’ve become an organizer and volunteer coordinator for.

2004: laid off from small company bought by big company, took a huge leap into $8 an hour and building concertinas, loved the work, amateur management not so much fun.

Retired now with a big sprawling novel project and a great little writing community being yet one more group in my life of inspiring collaborators, working together on our separate projects.