1990 - 1999 : Silicon Valley and Ireland

1996 - My Career Begins

Even though he had given me at least one raise that year, at this point I was probably making less than seven dollars per hour working for him. He offered me a salaried position at the consultancy worth something like $23,000 per year, and then immediately increased the offer to $27,000. I can't even describe how much money this sounded like at the time. It was at least twice what I had been making hourly working for the school.

As it turned out, Meta Systems was doing contract programming work for companies in Silicon Valley, which is one reason that Jim was sometimes on the phone or not present for classtime. There were some political issues within Meta Systems (I think related to a female admin) and both the male system admin DJ and a developer named Rusty were both leaving the company, so I basically had to assume all roles. There was another older employee named Tom in silicon valley, but he had had brain cancer and wasn't getting things done very quickly anymore. That summer, we hired an older guy that had worked at a bank, but he turned out to be not very productive.

I got to use a Sun Solaris workstation at Meta Systems. Probably the coolest thing in the office - which was previously a pizza parlor and has since become a laundrymat - was a Silicon Graphics (SGI) machine. This really seemed to be ahead of its time. The display and user interface were very high quality and it was very quiet. Even the case looked cool - I think it was purple when most machines of the time were beige.

The projects for Xilinx were about Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), which you can think of as a sort of precursor to XML and JSON that relied on highly structured simple text formats for exchanging files over Value Added Networks, which were basically secure dialup mailboxes where companies could exhchange purchase orders and other types of documents. Xilinx was in the process of migrating from a product named STX EDI to RMS OmniTrans, but had extended OmniTrans with capabilities write directly to Oracle through RogueWave libraries rather than writing to files for Oracle to import.

I inherited a bunch of mixed C/C++ code from Rusty that had the basics for interacting with Oracle. I don't remember changing this code much until I eventually needed to read from Oracle, and it went into production, which is kindof a miracle for something written by a college student that processes hundreds of millions of dollars worth of transactions yearly.

Apparently, Jim thought I had graduated from college. Meta Systems kindof collapsed and Xilinx made offers to all of its employees. In the fall of 1996, my offer was $42,000 yearly (about $21 per hour) with benefits including stock options. I remember driving from Humboldt to San Jose with Jim at least once, and staying at a couple of pretty nice places in Los Gatos. This was around the time that the .com started happening and there was basically no housing available - I had to sign a lease on a very expensive appartment in a gated commmunity that hadn't even finished construction. I bought a brand new 1996 Honda Civic DX and splurged on the optional air conditioner.

While the dealership was installing the air conditioner, they lent me a BMW. I don't think it was an M3, but I think it was an E36, which was the 3 series in production for most of the 90s. I absolutely loved this car and started to wish that I had bought it instead of the Honda, but it was too late.

Xilinx paid for a moving truck. Shannon and I moved to Silicon Valley, which was about three hours north of her parents' house in Carmel Valley, so we would see them more often.

Even though I had to be available by pager 24/7, I absolutely loved this job, which is where I did some of my best programming work ever. I also learned a lot about the silicon manufacturing process as well as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). I was proud when one of my cousins, an actual electrical engineer, told me that he had worked with our chips. I got to work on a Sun workstation that the previous owner had named Minsky. The company standardized on Netscape Navigator for browsing and email. Some people left the company to work at Netscape. I pioneered techniques that reduced code volume and complexity by several factors. I was absolutely the EDI guy for the company, and one of the managers nicknamed me Young Buck. The first system I developed from scratched pulled invoice data from Oracle Accounts Receivable and processed about $300,000,000 dollars worth of X12 810 invoices in its first year with only two errors, both of which it reported, and both of which were caused by invalid invoice data in the upstream system.

It was also a very lucrative position. In addition to the stock options, Jim gave me great performance reviews and my salary went up to something like $49,000 after the first year (worth about $23/hr). I didn't have any experience or a degree and after I moved out of that first appartment, my cost of living was relatively low. Xilinx had an office near Dublin in Ireland and I joked about being relocated there.

At that first apartment in Silicon Valley, Shannon told me that she had cheated on me with four other guys including one of her high school students. I literally tried to push her out of the apartment, possibly with her wearing no clothes. Possibly in forgiveness, this might have been the only time that she let me fuck her ass, which could have been one factor that helped us stay together. I had to continue working, which might have been somewhat healthy for me mentally, but I was absolutely crushed for some time. Shannon has sicne decided that that she cannot be a teacher.

1997

On the last day of in April of 1997, I turned 24 years old. This was my second tripple ox year, but I don't think I took much advantage of any special power I might have had then.

Shannon and I moved from the expensive appartment to a cheaper place. When we moved in, the apargment smelled badly of cigarettes.

It might have been around this time that I figured out how to download porn, though it might have been easier. At the time, the Internet wasn't really fast enough for video. In addition to the HTTP protocol that drives the World Wide Web, there are several other protocols including NNTP, which is the Network News Transport Protocol. This generally consisted of named message boards that allowed small messages. People used these to distribute images but they also allowed stitching together multiple messages to distribute videos. I think that Shannon caught me whacking off at least once, which felt something like cheating at the time, and was certainly embarassing.

My friend Brooke, who had lived on the same dorm floor as me, came to live with us for a few months. Brooke may be a bigger Rush fan than me, and we've seen Rush shows together. During college, he had been a political science major, possibly out of interest, but possibly also because this major apparently requires the fewest course completions.

During the time that he lived with Shannon and me, Brooke got what I consider to be his first real job, working for a company that did stage lighting for performances. I don't know if he's still at the same company, but he's still in the same industry as I write this in 2025. I think he's moved up from something like grunt to something like lighting director, travelled extensively, and been involved with some famous performers. A few years later, Brooke was able to get us free VIP parking and seat upgrades for a Rush show at the Shoreline Ampitheater in the bay area. He met his wife by shining a floodlight on her during a show, and I attended their wedding. He once told me that, after working for him, he no longer liked Les Claypool of Primus. I have to say, after my last two Primus shows, I don't like Les Claypool or Primus. Because of our locations and travels and children and his work commitments, we don't get to see each other much these days.

I remember programming a Java applet. If you don't like Java now, you're lucky that you never had to try to get it to do anything significant when it was running in a very unstable virtual machine in a browser window (this was before tabs).

After my second year at Xilinx, I told Jim that I wanted to finish my degree, which is when I learned that he thought that I had already graduated. By this time, the EDI program was entirely dependent on me. Tom and everyone else had left. Xilinx had hired a Chinese woman and an older guy, but they were both basically worthless. I don't think the Chinese woman did anything but smell bad and the guy worked on a single transaction (X12 863, silicon wafer test results) for more than a year and never got it right. When I eventually took that over, it took a few days to get it working, and I think around that time both of them disappeared.

This all put Jim in a difficult position, so he didn't want me to leave. He offered to relocate the EDI program to Ireland, and I made my first international move. Shannon and I stayed in Dublin for about a month and then rented a little attached house in Lucan, which was about 6 miles from the company facility. The company leased an Audi A4 for me. I was probably making more like $70,000 at this point, paid in US dollars, with very low cost of living in Ireland.

1998

The team in Ireland consisted of me, another developer named PJ who was a great workmate, a young woman whose name I forget, and our manager Simon. I was spoiled rotten and quit again after nine months, which really upset Simon and Jim. I just wasn't enjoying the work the way that I had at first, and maybe felt a bit isolated in Ireland. Looking back, this was really one of the best jobs I ever had.

1999

The Star Wars Phantom Menace movie came out in 1999, and Tim and I saw it in a theater together. We were both incredibly disappointed. Not only were we clearly too old for Star Wars, but the movie itself was abysmal. Since then, Star Wars movies have been somewhat hit and miss, but in general they have all ben huge disapointments for me relative to expectations and potential.

I went back to college, but found that I was teaching my professors some things, as well as leading projects and classroom discussions that weren't benefiting me much. School was really slow and boring relative to industry.

Along with my computing classes, I took a Speach class again because I wanted to develop public speaking skills. This turned out to be my favorite class because I did a project about the Samurai and Zen Buddhism. While I have incredible admiration for the personal discipline, honor, and bravery of this Japanese warrior class from feudal Japan, I was particularly interested in the concept of a ronin, a samurai that has lost their master, which can result from personal failure or events beyond their control, such as the death of that master.

I don't remember her name or how we met - maybe in my speach class - but almost as soon as we got back to Humboldt, I became friends with an attractive young woman. She had a boyfriend, but I think she was also interested in me.

Shannon didn't like the fact that I had a female friend. I came home to the house that we rented on day and she threw things at me.

Shannon and I broke up and I moved into a small room in the house where Shannon and I had previously rented an apartment. Almost immediately, Shannon was with a younger guy named Kris, who I think is one of the guys with whom she cheated on me (possibly around the times that I was in Ireland alone)

I stayed friends with the girl I had met, but the closest we ever got to kissing was being naked in a hot tub together once, when I almost grabbed her boobs. One time she was in my room and she said something like "Well, I'm here" or "Well, I'm ready", but I never moved on her.

Around this time, I read a really good book about Zen Buddhism, which I can't find now. I think that girl also introduced me to Rumi. I think that these things helped me to get past my relationship with Shannon.

Shannon's friends started to seem really immature and lame to me. One of them would do a voice like a character from Southpark, but they all claimed that he had done it before Southpark. I had serious doubts.

One time I sold her boyfriend an ounce of really good weed. They claimed it was a couple of grams short. If an ounce looks good, I don't always weigh it. I don't remember taking any little commission, so maybe it had started out light or hadn't finished curing before sale. Even though they had likely smoked some of it, I accepted the return and refunded them the money.

I wasn't supposed to smoke in the house, but I sometimes did, and lit incense, but I wasn't supposed to burn incense either. Sometimes I smoked in the car.

I had a couple of sexual experiences with a girl that lived in another room of the house. She was nerdy, really into birds. She swallowed, saying something about how she wouldn't want to waste it, but we never had sex. She had an incredibly tight pussy, as if she had never been laid, although she talked about having sex with some other guy. Things were kindof awkward between us afterwards because we lived in the same hosue for several months and she wanted a relationship, but I was not interested and she likely knew what I was trying to date other people.

I only remember one of those people. I think we met through an excite.com post that I had put up. She was young and Christian, so there was really no chance of it going anywhere. We spent some time together, but I don't think we ever even kissed.

I'm pretty embarassed to admit it, but I met Susan online towards the end of 1999, and I felt like we fell in love before we even met in person. This was long before online dating took off and it seemed somehow magical, even though I lived in California and she lived in Colorado. I offered to drive out there for Thanksgiving break but that was probably too quick. She met me in the bay area during Christmas break. She already graduated but still worked at Coloradu University Boulder doing some kind of admin job, and I think she still took language and possibly singing or other classes there.

Susan and I exchanged huge numbers of emails. A that time, the name associated with my email account was "wave-tossed man, which was partially how I felt, but also a reference to the concept of a ronin. I don't know that Susan ever asked what it meant. Susan's name was technically Shan Susan Gao, where in Mandarin Chinese, shan means something like lithe or supple, gao can mean something like high or tall, and Susan was a name that someone had chosen for her because it sounded something like Shan. To be honest, I've never liked the name Susan, which to me sounds rather archaic, describing someone formal. overly conservative, and potentially sexually and otherwise represesed. I got the impression that Susan was an intellectual interested specifically in literature analysis.

Susan is PRC Chinese, by which I mean not only that she is genetically Chinese, but that she was born in mainland China (the People's Republic of China) rather than Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, or elsewhere. Her parents, who were some kind of genetic scientists, moved to Colorado when she was ten, though her father subsequently moved to New Jersey and her mother eventually followed her, while Susan stayed and went to the University of Colorado in Boulder. When I met Susan, she had a greencard.

Having grown up in a community that tried to respect all cultures, having seen ads on TV that promoted Chinese culture (I can still alost hear the children saying "I am proud to be a Chinese American"), having studied Chinese classical culture a bit, knowing of China as the source of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, and being basically completely unaware of historic events such as the Chinese cultural revolution and resulting famine, I have always had respect for Chinese culture. Throughout our relationship, I learned that at least some of this respect is not warranted by some elements of modern Chinese culture.

We had our first real argument over email. She took offense at something I had written about being interested in discovering her sexual skills. I should have ended the relationship at that point.

Susan didn't want to live in Humboldt. I think it was at this time that I looked at a job opportunity with Hunter Douglas (the company that makes window blinds) in Colorado, probably doing something with EDI, but the whole thing looked really boring. I applied at a couple of places in the bay area and somehow ended up with a job as a "Senior Consultant" with a company in Oakland named Endymion. I remmeber they offerred me something like $10K more than I had requested, which I think was about $80K/yr. I kindof felt like something was wrong, but didn't know exactly what it was (I think much of the consulting industry). I later learned that the management was somehow related to that behind the origins of March First, which is kindof a notorious scam from the .com period.

By the end of 1999, I was probably in the best shape of my life. I was riding my mountain bike through the forests of Humboldt almost every day, doing up to 300 push-ups in sets of 50 or 60 along the way, and doing sit-ups as well. I could hold a hand stand for quite a while.