Andrew's History, etc.

School

I attended Holy Cross Elementary School 1973-1981, Harbor High 1981-1985, and graduated from U.C. Santa Cruz in 1989 with a degree in Computer and Information Science with an emphasis in compiler design, of all things. (That's how I have this alumni account.)

My wife teases me because I asked for her SAT score on our first date—hey, you have to have your standards! I was pretty much a B+ student, but I scored in the 90 percentiles on the SAT. She was an A student and did well on the SATs, but I outscored her . . . heh, heh, heh. *ahem*

Hobbies

I'm learning to play the bagpipes—one never really stops learning. I have an entire web site devoted to bagpiping: BagpipeJourney.com

My bagpiping instructor is Jay Salter, here's his website:
San Francisco Bay Area Bagpiper

Once every few years or so, I get out my HO scale trains (no layout though). I enjoy doing graphic design—newsletters, for instance—for various charitable causes for which I donate time. Once upon at time I used to collect comic books, up through my sophmore year in high school (Flash, X-men mostly, but some Fantastic Four and Spiderman.).

I love playing sports, but don't get out much to do it. Football is my favorite, having played Junior Varsity in high school. I was actually 3rd string quarterback for a short while---my first throw at practice was for a touchdown---but I needed a few more inches to be able to see over the line! Ultimate Frisbee is a blast, kind of like a combination of football and soccer. I enjoy that quite a bit, but don't get to play it that often. The sport I would have to say I play most is tennis, usually with my friend John (who is slightly better than I am) or with my wife.

I play poker with buddies a few times a year. Anyone for "Seven card stud, high/low Chicago"?

I have a dart board in my garage, but don't use it all that often.

I work too much.

Work

I work at Lenz Arts, Inc., the family business. My parents decided to start paying me for my work when I was 9. If you figure this, I've been working at the same place for over 25 years*.

More stuff about work.

*This isn't entirely accurate since I worked at the now defunct Mountain Computer in Scotts Valley for the summer of 1989 in a temporary software engineer position. It was interesting. My first and only experience of being mildly caught between the marketing department and the engineering department of a large company. My project was to create a demo version of their tape backup software—classic case of an old C program being modified over and over. Spaghetti code. Stuff the tell you in school to not do: the function headers had one line comments, variable names were four characters, file names were cryptic, the code had GOTO statements, gag.
What was cool was what my supervisor, a senior engineer, said to me after a couple months. "You know, you're a real programmer."