Jeff's profile

Member since August 8, 2007 (about 1 year ago)

A little bit about me

I’m the lead programmer at Handmeon. Actually, I’m the only programmer, so I guess I could call myself the Vice President of Engineering if I felt like it. I live in Vermont with my wife Maureen , three children, two dogs, and six chickens. We have just returned from seven years living on a barge in France. I also like hiking, running, baking bread, bumper stickers, analogies, photography, playing the mandolin, india pale ale, refrigerator magnets, and sociology.

Apologia

The child of college professor in a small new england college town, I always assumed I would be a college professor myself someday because, after all, the pursuit of knowledge is the oldest and noblest profession. I was accepted at Yale, despite a complete lack of athletic ability or extracurricular activities (an oversight that I trust would never happen today) and had the good fortune to be an English major there in the heyday of the visionary company. I loved it, but my fond ambitions were shattered on an rainy Thursday afternoon, at a reception for John Ashberry in the Davenport College common room, as I watched Harold Bloom, lying on his back on the carpet hold his sherry glass aloft to be filled by an acolyte, and I realized, in a flash of sanity that I just didn’t have what it took to make it in academia. I finally understood exactly why my parents found ‘Lucky Jim’ so very amusing.

Finding myself in the spring of senior year lacking both a suit and a calling, I had the presence of mind to flunk Music Appreciation (also known as ‘Clapping for Credit’) thus buying myself a summer term to gather my thoughts. It was a nice try, but I misjudged the amount of rethinking required. (Though I had a good time reading the Greek tragedies.) I spent the next few years wandering in the wilderness, delivering organic carrot cake in a battered Volkswagen van, working as a substitute in Day Care centers, writing bad poetry – until I discovered that I could, in fact, make a living writing, as long as I was willing to do it in languages with no adjectives, such as Fortran, Pascal, SQL, and C. After a few years apprenticeship, I finally caught the wave, learned to enter the flow state, found my voice – and I discovered with delight and amazement that I was actually being payed to play. Writing software, once you can see past the code, is like building castles, without having to exploit the serfs. Like making zen gardens and getting paid to rearrange the stones to your hearts content. Like writing Family Mission Statements for families without toads in them…

But all too soon, I started to want to make up my own games, and play by my own rules, and soon I was joining startups, starting companies, borrowing money, living in a tent and writing software at night in narrow rented rooms above dentist’s offices. Offices with bongo boards and duck telephones that quacked instead of ringing, and all the other appurtenances of engineering bohemia. Quite by accident I had stepped from the golden age of deconstruction into the digital age. Moore’s law was our golden rule: every year life got 80% better, and 80% faster. But like all Edens, there was a snake in the garden. As Vice President of Engineering at an internet startup in Silicon Valley during the internet bubble, I got a good peek into the heart of darkness. Pretty soon I was back in Vermont, fortuitously cured of a dangerous case of greed and ambition.

Somewhat by accident, I ended up with a number of shares in a company that pulled-off a hugely over-valued IPO just before the internet bubble burst, and thanks to a quarrel with the venture capitalists who had invested in the company, I was free to sell them. (Company insiders were restricted from selling their shares for three months following the IPO - by which time, much of the air had gone out of them.) It didn’t amount to what passes for wealth nowadays, but it did permit me to stage my midlife crisis under favorable conditions. We took an extended family sabbatical and lived on a barge in France. We spent three years cruising around the canals and rivers of France, and then another three years in Strasbourg where our girls attended the international school while my wife and I studied at the University. It was a wonderful opportunity to do some mental housekeeping and rejuvenate my neglected and atrophied neurons.

We eventually reluctantly faced the fact that we had to go home again (even though you can’t.) The girls needed to be from somewhere, and we had to do something. Perhaps it was a failure of imagination. Perhaps it was wisdom. (Are those two things different?) Certainly it was financial pressure. But here we are.

Since we came back, my wife Maureen has started Heritance with a French friend who is an architect and museographer. I started Handmeon with two friends I’d worked with in the past. I sometimes wonder whether Handmeon will turn out to be a not-for-profit too, but without the benefits of 501(c)(3) status.

I know it sounds un-American, but I don’t really care about getting rich. (Though obviously I do want to earn a living.) Mostly, I want to do something that makes a difference. I guess you could say that I’ve had a conversion experience, thanks to a large extent to George Bush – and to Abu Ghraib. I wrote a lot about torture and collective responsibility early on, but didn’t know where to go with it. (OK, since we are on the topic of impending doom, I should have been worrying about Global Warming long before Abu Ghraib came along. Like most of my generation, I was a willfully blind idiot, and in my heart I knew it. I apologize.)

I felt a lot of trepidation and guilt about coming back to the states. As if staying in Europe somehow absolved of me of responsibility. That was obviously just self-serving wishful thinking. Recently, I have come to the conclusion that nothing short of a wholesale change in our values can save us (and perhaps the planet) from ourselves. A daunting prospect, but isn’t it cheering to think that if so much change is needed, you can start practically anywhere!

I suppose it sounds presumptuous, if not ludicrous, to hope that Handmeon could help change the world, but I actually think that a lot of our social problems have to do with our failure to get out from under a scarcity mentality that leads us to compulsively accumulate junk and expend energy far beyond what we need, or what the planet can sustain. I guess my hope is that Handmeon will provide an opportunity, if only in homeopathic doses, for all of us to experiment with new ways of sharing.

Sojourns with Jeff