My father was a mill worker, sometimes lumberjack in the redwood forests of northern California. I was born in the town of Scotia, a company town to this day. Scotia sits along the Eel River, opposite Rio Dell, where I spent many of my formative years. Rio Dell, at that time served as an overflow community to Scotia, which is owned by the Pacific Lumber Company, for whom my father worked.
When I was about five, my parents went their separate ways and I entered into what I can only describe as, well you get the picture. Let me tell you that you can’t open the door to hell, look inside and ever expect to shake off what you see there. So it was with me. A couple of years in hell, and almost fifty years later, I’m still haunted by the events of those two years. I won’t get into the details, read Dante’s Inferno and you begin to get an idea…
A couple of years later, I was rescued from my fate. Other than the nightmares and the psychic shockwaves from my dark past, I had an uneventful childhood, if you don’t count moving every year or so.
As a result of all this fun, I naturally tended to stay away from people, having a built in aversion to them. This gave me plenty of time to read. Read what?, you must be asking. Well, I read everything I could get my hands on.
I read my fathers hunting magazines, his popular mechanics, popular science. I read my step mother’s true crime and her many women’s magazines. I read the encyclopedia cover to cover, all twenty volumes. I read the science and technology encyclopedia, all ten volumes. I read the Bible encyclopedia, again ten volumes. I read catalogs on subject I knew nothing about. I read science fiction, and yes, I even read textbook for fun.
Quite literally, I read everything I could get my hands on, few subject were off limits to me, most notably romance, horror, and fantasy. All these I did before I reached the age of thirteen. I did this because I had lots of time to do it. As an outcast, I was never included in social activities with other children, if anything they were a constant source of angst and I went through my entire teens on the verge of suicide.
When I was ten, I wanted to be a mad scientist, the good kind. In high school, I was a student aide for my science teacher and was well on my way into the world of science and engineering.
I discovered a little black box, a sort of super primitive computing training device, that I took home from school on occasion and learned about computers from the pre ENIAC technology.
After short three years of High School, I Joined the United States Air Force and REDACTED.
After leaving the Air Force, I did a bunch of odd jobs, trying to find one I could live with. Probably the most interesting job during that period was being a target for a crop duster. After a year or so of these odd jobs, I went to college as an electronics engineering student with a criminal Justice minor where I enjoyed a short career in law enforcement before I discovered that I didn’t have the temperament for the job.
It was during my time at the college that I discovered the computer room. For the next six months, I pretty much ignored most of my other classes. I was captivated by the whole idea of computers, having remembered playing with their primitive ancestor in high school.
I moved to Los Angeles, took a course in computer programming, got a job and have been doing it ever since. To be sure, I’ve moved around a bit, dome some interesting things, such as inventing flight following used by the airline industry, building the first computer for a private yacht, writing telemetry programs for our deep space probes (Mars, Mercury, Venus, Both Voyagers, Space shuttle, to name a few. If you’re using a PC, you’re using technology I developed. I invented the electrostatic knotmeter (look ma, no moving paddles to foul), the floppy disk Lock,
I build robots for fun, high powered rockets too. I love tinkering with things. I love computer programming and do it as a hobby and for a living.
In 1990, I moved from California to Maryland. As I sped through Oklahoma, I stopped at every souvenir shop I saw and picked up every book that had anything to do with the Cherokee as I am of Cherokee descent.
When I got out here, my wife promptly left me and a few months later, I met my current wife. I started writing love letters to her and then decided to do them in Cherokee and well, the rest is history. I wrote the ancestor of this program in an early version of Visual Basic and when the web exploded on the scene, I rewrote the program for the web. When ColdFusion came out, my first Coldfusion application was the translation of the VB program to Coldfusion. It’s been on the web since 1996 and has gone through a number of facelifts. The latest version is this one, which I wrote in a few hours using the Mach-II framework. I did it mostly as an exercise in porting existing applications to Mach-II.
I am a General class amateur radio operator, who got started as a youngster in grade school.
I currently work in Baltimore, Maryland and live not too far out of town with my wife, Diane, and our Jack Russell Terrier, Sparky.
The simple truth is that I wanted to give something to the community. Something that would help to keep the Cherokee language alive. The only way I could see being able to make any contribution was to write a program that does two way translations between Cherokee and English, a rather simple problem when it gets down to it.
