My life in Los Angeles

I moved to southern California on August 21st, 1981, to attend graduate school at the University of Southern California, where I received a Masters of Science in Geophysics in 1985.

Hollywood from downtown, click for big pic

For 8 years I was a computer programmer and systems administrator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. I worked on two major projects while there. From 1992 to 1995 I was the computer systems manager for the Mission Operations Team for the SIR-C project. I also did programming and Ingres database administration. There was a follow-on flight, SRTM, which flew in February of 2000. Almost all of the original SIR-C team had moved onto other projects or away from JPL. So this new mission had a new team who chose new ground hardware and software. I would have loved to be a part of that mission, but it was not meant to be.

The other major project I worked on was the Beacon Monitor Experiment, one of twelve major experiments on the DS1 spacecraft. DS1's primary mission was to test new hardware, including an ion propulsion drive. Its secondary mission was to visit a comet. The DS1 on-board computer used VxWorks, a type of Unix. The spacecraft had an IP address and showed up as a node on the JPL network. We would use FTP to send it updated software and data. I wrote the ground software for Beacon Monitor, mostly Motif GUIs to a pseudo-relational databases.

Also at JPL, I helped with the Kidsat project.

I live in Los Angeles, on the border between Hollywood and West Hollywood. (Look here for info on recent earthquakes.)

Currently I work downtown. Now that Los Angeles' one subway line is open, I try to take the subway to work once or twice a week.