Howdy! I'm Jeff Kirk, the vainglorious fameseeker whose web site this is. If you're bored enough with your humdrum, everyday existence to be interested in my life and philosophy, by all means, read on! Otherwise, bail out while you still can. You've been warned.

MY BACKGROUND

I was born in Farmington, New Mexico, to Lloyd Quincy and Doris Eugenia Baker Johnson, both schoolteachers. My mother passed away in August of 1996, another in an endless series of victims of the bloodthirsty tobacco industry. My father died on February 3, 2003. He and I were estranged; I hadn't spoken with him in twelve or thirteen years. In April of 2000, I legally changed my name to Jeffrey Kirk, since I didn't want to carry my father's last name any longer.

I grew up in Farmington, which was a reasonable place to live, although I was bookish and isolated from other children my age. I lived on a farm several miles from town. There were no other kids my age around, except at school, and I didn't get along with many of them. Not enough socialization at an early age resulted in a nerdy, isolated kid who didn't really know how to deal with other people very well. I retreated into my own head, and had few close friends. It was a hard childhood, and I don't miss it.

Without dwelling on the details, home life was not happy. I managed to escape a mere six weeks after I graduated from high school, and started college at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology during the summer session. I was so happy to be out away from Farmington that I signed up for ten credit hours: intro chemistry, biology, and computer science--not exactly a light course load for a twelve week semester. Got straight A's. Yep, I sure loved not being around my dad.

Two years later, I had finally discovered that I didn't want to be a physicist. I transferred to the University of New Mexico where in 1987 I received my BS in biology, with a minor in chemistry, magna cum laude in General Honors. I finally managed to come out of my shell somewhat, and finally began to enjoy life. It helped that the people I got to know were smart, slightly bitter, and possessed of a decent sense of humor. I'll never forget those wonderful people, even though I've lost contact with most of them over the years. One of them, Craig Shane, got in touch recently, to my great delight. He's an emergency physician at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City.

After graduation, I spent nearly a year as a technician in the Physiology Department of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. That was a fun experience, but I knew I wouldn't be turning it into a lifelong career. I'd applied to a bunch of graduate schools, and was accepted by UC Berkeley with an eye towards a Ph.D. in molecular biology. I moved to Berkeley in August of 1988.

My God, what a culture shock.

Berkeley was a real eye-opener. I was astounded and more than a little intimidated by this crowded, dirty city. Remember, I grew up in rural New Mexico, and I used to think Albuquerque was a big city. Now I was in Berkeley, south of the University, with its backwards seasons (cold and foggy in the summer, hot and humid in the fall, damp and mildewy in the winter, and hot and humid in the spring), perpetual street noise, squalor, riots, poverty, burnt-out ex-hippies redolent of patchouli oil, and outrageously expensive low-quality housing.

I lived in a single room in a little Victorian house six blocks from school. I got to walk down Telegraph Avenue every day, and was usually asked for spare change at least three times in each direction. It's quite a thing to move from a single room in an adobe house near the Rio Grande to a squalid little hovel in a run-down Victorian with a magnificent view of an anonymous-looking high-rise apartment building, with the Shrieking Next-Door Banshee Kids From Hell playing Screaming Stickball in their slovenly back yard, all day long, every single day of the year, come rain or shine, those little bastards! Oops, sorry about that.

I always felt vaguely out of place in Berkeley. It was an interesting school, but it was undergoing a serious upheaval which I wasn't fully aware of when I moved out. For one thing, the Zoology department was being split up into Molecular Cell Biology, Genetics, and Plant Sciences departments, and moving into a new building. The old Life Sciences Building, a planet-sized behemoth of a structure built during the Great Depression of the 30's, was going to be gutted and rebuilt from the ground up. I had a hard time selecting an advisor whose interests matched my own. Unfortunately, I chose the wrong lab, and I had a miserable experience. It wasn't the professor's fault: he was a really good guy. But he was very busy, and so were all the grad students in his lab, and I wasn't really sure I wanted to do what I was doing. But it was too late, I was there. And I sure as hell wasn't ready for the grinding boredom of lab work. I thought it would be really fun, but it turned out to be... boring. If you're really interested in solving a particular problem, you can drive through the boredom and maybe even contribute something significant to science. But if you're more interested in reading about science than doing it, boy, you are in the wrong racket.

About the middle of my second year, I developed a severe case of mononucleosis, and I was stuck in bed for about six months. My professor was kind enough to keep paying me while I was sick, but I had to drop all of my classes (sort of a relief, actually, since immunology was damned hard.) I got better slowly, but even when I felt halfway decent again, I still couldn't bring myself to go back to the lab. It was a fascinating experiment in graduate school self-destruction. (As John Irving said in The World According to Garp: "What's gradual school, Daddy?" "It's where you go and gradually discover you don't want to go to school anymore.") But I did enjoy playing with computers. I poked around on my Mac, and spent endless hours playing computer games, creating Hypercard stacks, making artwork, and chatting with people on local BBSes.

Finally my graduate advisor ran out of time or money or patience and decided to stop paying me while I was out malingering. I got a letter saying that I needed to find another sponsor. I decided that I'd drop out instead. I didn't enjoy grad school, and it was clear that I'd make a pretty lackadaisical scientist. I turned to computers for employment, and within a week of quitting grad school, I was working for a small Macintosh software company, RagTime USA, which sold a neat integrated word processor / spreadsheet / graphics program (and it's still sold today, by the original German company that produced it). Thank God for BMUG (the Berkeley Macintosh Users Group). I picked up and moved to Fremont, a pretty large bedroom community in the East Bay. I drove across the Dumbarton Bridge every day to Redwood City. It was kind of a lousy commute, but I was working, doing something I enjoyed for a change, and it felt rather good. Certainly it was a far cry from Berzerkeley. I can't tell you how relieved I was to leave that sour little burg behind.

I spent two years working at RagTime. I started as its sole technical support specialist, but eventually wound up being the tech support manager, with two other employees working with me. RagTime was a nifty product, still popular in Europe but poorly marketed in the US. Eventually the US distributorship closed and I had to find other work. It was a good ride, though. I got to take my first trip to Europe while working for RagTime. Hey, you can still get RagTime, for MacOS 9, X, and even for any of the various substandard flavors of Windows (shudder). It's a cool program. You can even use it for free, for non-commercial purposes. Ausgezeichnet!

After the US RagTime distributorship closed, I finagled a job at HELIOS USA, which met a similar fate a few years later, though not because of the product. Instead, idiotic management decisions were the downfall of the US distributorship. The German HELIOS organization is still doing fine. In spite of the crazy management, it was a lot of fun. That's where I learned UNIX, and spent a little time with PCs, although at the time I would rather have gnawed off my right foot without the help of Tabasco sauce than use a PC. (I'd like to say I still eschew PCs, but since I'm a Linux user now, they're not so bad. I even keep a few Windows machines around, strictly for games, of course.) When HELIOS USA closed its doors, and paid off its ex-employees with computer equipment and office furniture, I decided it was time to find a new job.

I then spent several months working as a Mac sys admin contractor for Syntex (now part of Roche Pharmaceuticals), where they invented The Pill and Aleve, and (intermittently) for Silicon Graphics, Inc. Eventually I got a permanent job offer from Synopsys. Turns out a recruiter who worked for a head-hunter I once tried to use remembered me from a foiled attempt to get me into Pacific Data Images as a UNIX guy, and recommended me to the management at Synopsys. I worked in the Core Services group of the Network and Computing Systems department. It was a terrific job, and I worked with wonderful people. Unfortunately, during the Spindler Years at Apple, when the product quality was declining and red ink started pouring from the ledgers, Synopsys' higher management concluded that it was a platform without a future, and began to convert to PCs. Auuuugggghhh! PCs again! And after my mother died in 1996, I thought it was time for a change of scenery.

In December of 1996 I went to WebTV Networks, Inc., in Palo Alto. A bunch of my friends from Synopsys had already made the leap to that startup, which was known at the time under the code-name Artemis Research (whose putative research subject was the effects of sleep deprivation--truer words were never spoken). I followed my buddies a few months later. WebTV was an exciting, dynamic, and incredibly interesting place to work. I was there for three and a half years. I was there when we got the word that Microsoft was going to buy us. I can't claim to have been there for the IPO, because there was no IPO, but I was there when they bought out our stock options and converted them to Microsoft stock. Yippee!

I also had corrective eye surgery in 1996, which was life-changing. You might have noticed that in almost all of the pictures from my childhood, I have glasses. I didn't just have glasses: I had Optical Time Bending Devices, thick enough to shield me from bullets, powerful enough that I could see the past, the present, and the future, all at the same time. Before the surgery, my focal distance was about half an inch in front of my nose. (For the optometrists out there, my right eye was -10.5 diopters with 2 cylinders of astigmatism, and my left eye was a magnificent -14 diopters with 1.25 cylinders of astigmatism. Whoopee!) Now I can actually read the clock when I wake up, and though the LASIK and ALK surgery didn't correct my eyes perfectly, I can get away with contact lenses to correct what little nearsightedness and astigmatism remains. With that degree of nearsightedness, I am happy to have gotten such a good result. Yahoo!

Unfortunately, the Mac platform at WebTV started to go the way of the dodo, not because of its inviability, but because, of course, Microsoft was already pretty much a PC shop, so everyone got PCs and turned in their Macs. Almost everyone, that is; a hardy cadre of die-hard Mac maniacs kept their trusty machines and continued to do useful work on them. Microsoft as an employer isn't really Mac-hostile, by the way; it is, after all, the largest Mac software developer outside of Apple. But the corporate IT support guys just don't care about it.

When I saw the writing on the wall, I moved from doing Mac support to doing Engineering, where I did Linux work for the development team. That may seem a big leap, but I'd already had quite a bit of UNIX experience at HELIOS and even at Synopsys, so it wasn't that bad. I helped define a standard development machine for the service team, which was still UNIX-based at the time, and spent many hours figuring out how to build kernels and install weirdo drivers for cards that were never intended to be used on Compaq Pro Workstation 6000s. Eventually I transferred into Network Operations and took over the day-to-day management of the WebTV test services, used to perform large-scale testing on the service software itself. I worked in that department for about two years. It was a really enjoyable experience.

Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to build this big old campus near Highways 101 and 85 in Mountain View. Well, that wasn't unfortunate in and of itself; it was always a good idea to consolidate all the working groups into a single location. But the architect they hired built these giant anonymous slabs of buildings with anonymous-looking offices in an anonymous and undistinguished place. And I'd pretty much mastered the tasks I had been assigned, and was starting to get bored.

And after we moved our department down to Mountain View, it was no longer possible to pretend that I worked for a startup. The Palo Alto building was a cheerful mess, which I've come to associate with people working hard enough that they don't really give a flying fig about their surroundings. The Mountain View campus is attractive but sterile. The offices are well-equipped but anonymous. I never got the feeling that the department was going to regain its sense of esprit-de-corps, especially after many of my closest friends, whom I'd worked with since the Synopsys days, began to leave for new startups.

So, in spite of the good pay and reasonable benefits and nice working conditions, I began to grow restless. I started making inquiries about new positions, and lo and behold, I managed to get one at one of those startups I was talking about! I got a job at Moxi Digital, Inc., formerly known as Rearden Steel Technologies, working with a bunch of buddies from several of my old employers.

We took TechTV's Best in Show award (celebration photo below) at the January 2002 Consumer Electronics Show.

In May of 2002 Moxi merged with Digeo, Inc. of Kirkland, Washington. I worked in the Engineering department as a kind of a jack-of-all-trades. In December 2006 Digeo closed the Palo Alto office, and I took a job at Zvents, Inc. It's a lot more fun than Digeo was.

These days I'm spending most of my spare time writing a book. I've finished the first draft, and am now on rewrites. I'm blogging about the process; it's pretty interesting.