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location: Pasadena, California.
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age: 27
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occupation: aerospace mechanisms engineer
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why? Because it's fun to give life and motion to cold hard steel
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Maybe fun in a practical sort of way. What else is fun?
Climbing mountains. Snow sports, paddling, biking... Woodworking. Photography. Food.
The fun is in eating it, mainly; and some things simply aren't available pre-made the way I want them so I make it my business to bake bread, grill burgers, steam vegetables, and otherwise put fire and iron to use in my kitchen.
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There it is again, fire and iron - or steel. Why?
Personally, I think iron is just a really great material. It's tough, it can be heat treated and sharpened to a fine edge, it's magnetic, and it's found in blood and in dark leafy green vegetables. Some people really like silicon, and computers and beach sand and such, but personally, I'm an iron sort of guy. I cook with cast iron pans. I grill my steak to pink and juicy. I have a garage full of tools and a truck to drive them around. And out on the deck, I have some planters with rich dark soil sprouting leafy green iron-rich vegetables. Not that I go seeking iron; I just happened to realize there's this theme to my lifestyle.
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What about the fire part?
Fire is energy. Commanding fire means one has power - this is useful for all sorts of things, like making toast or annealing a bit of wire or propelling a vehicle through the atmosphere. It's something that I like to understand at its most basic level. Being able to create fire opens up all sorts of possible ways to apply human ingenuity.
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Sure, if you're stranded in the wilderness...
Indeed, the wilderness is one of my favorite places. I generally keep to the land; ocean wilderness and small islands lack the intensity of adventure that I've felt when sighting a distant mountain range from the top of a spindly windblown tree. There is such diversity out there, beyond the paved uniformity of our cities and towns; it's inspiring. That's why I have all these photographs of wild places. I like cities too - especially for their availability of tools and supplies and fantastic restaurants - and this meshes together perfectly with my appreciation for wild places. If people all live in cities, the wilderness will stay wild.
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What makes a good week - besides eating food and traipsing around in wild places with fire and iron?
I am content, for the most part, if I find solutions to some persistent technical problems at work, and make progress on one of my other projects, and use up all the groceries I bought in a burst of excitement at the weekend farmers' market. It's important that these things happen of their own accord... I almost never wake to an alarm clock. Freedom to wake when I want means the day has started well, and this doesn't mean that I sleep late. I have my routines - bicycling to the work, making rounds to all my favorite grocery stores, making things at the wood shop, straightening up the house. I read some (always nonfiction), write some, eat, sleep, and as often as possible I go out and try to discover something new. On a good week I might meet up with friends and go somewhere we've never been before: a new place in town, a new city, a new park, a new country. I travel often.
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How did all this come about?
I'm originally from western Massachusetts and I went to school nearby in upstate New York. Even though I've lived in California some seven years now, I still keep a perspective that formed in a little rural town with seasons and endless acres of open space. There were logs to haul, tractors to fix, and crops and animals to tend. I poured concrete and built stone walls and learned a little about putting up a house, running wire and pipe, setting tile and glass, and doing that sort of work. My formal education is technical and I have some fantastic work experience with NASA research and spacecraft development projects; aerospace precision and home-grown problem solving strategies together define the work I do. I was influenced in a big way by three trips I made years ago to far flung places - China in 1997, East Africa in 2001, and part of South America in 2003 - I was stunned by how different life was in those places at those times and also intrigued by the glimmer of meaning I found especially bright, or maybe just less obscured, in the hard lives of people I saw. The greatest lesson of it all has been that few people will approach an issue in the same way. Communication and effective leadership amid huge cultural diversity requires a deep understanding of people and places, and so I travel and collect my thoughts in these pages.
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What about your own culture? of music and movies and such...
I feel best acquainted with classic rock rooted in the '60s and '70s, the sort of raw intense music that speaks directly from the guitar. Boston, Van Halen, Styx, America, Foreigner, Led Zeppelin, Heart, Tom Petty, and some more aggressive music like Def Leppard, and softer types too like the Eagles and Journey and the Beatles. I listen to country now and then too - good driving music - and at work I exclusively tune into classical music. I really like the work of Copland and Smetana and Dvorak, to name a few composers. With music in general I hardly hear the words so instrumental pieces are great for me.
I don't own a single DVD or video. I like movies (does anyone not?) but I can't seem to enjoy watching one more than once or twice. I remember so much and there are other things I would rather be doing. It may be an odd perspective, but for me, watching television or movies is to be handled just like consuming food or drink. I'm careful what I put in my body, and so too what I put in my mind. With the mind, once it goes in it's never coming out. I could drown in television sitcoms; instead I watch History and Discovery. Favorite movies? I keep a list instead of a library. Recent additions were 'The Lives of Others' and 'Into the Wild' and 'Ratatouille'. when enough time passes, I'll go rent them again.
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What will the future bring?
In the last ten years, the world has become much smaller than it was. This happened not just to my world, I think, but to many others as well. Certain information is so accessible now, like maps and photographs and news about current events and cultural activities. It is easy to collect a continuous stream of rich and colorful experiences just going through the motions of everyday life. Less accessible is the wealth of technical knowledge bound in aging books and experienced minds. I aim to get at this knowledge, and apply it in ways I uniquely can, to make more from less. Efficiency is my mantra. Self-sufficiency will not be enough for us; order and defense and smart management will be essential in a crowded world to keep the peace and wild places I enjoy. Thus a common theme threads its way through my interests, weaving together the engineering and wilderness and global wanderings: I am simply building a castle.
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