A few Bytes
About Mr Bill
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"...The hills are shadows and they flow
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A few Bytes
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- 00:09 am mst, March 12, 2008, Wednesday I'm rewriting this so its in a state of flux at present. Please escuse spelling errors. I'm teh sloppy typist. I fix them as I notice them. I am a geochemist. Its a good vocation if you like occasionally going out for field work, but also like working with instruments and computers in the laboratory. Geochemists draw from many fields of expertise to solve problems in the Earth Sciences. My favorite rocks are Proterozoic granites. Especially the so-called A-Type Granites. Geologists have a joy in the understanding how geological processes change the earths form. All experience is deepened if it is informed by knowledge. I often tell my hiking companions what the exposed strata and forms of the land tell me about the surrounding vista. I think every person should take a course in geomorphology. We are surrounded by land forms and water, and causes, and effects. Its difficult to explain how beautiful the earth is to me when I have some idea of the processes that are shaping it. I'm afraid I effuse about it far to often to everyone around me. I first heard the poem above, at the funeral of Earl Lovejoy who taught me structural geology and geomorphology. He was quite an influence on my future career choices. I got my first field geologist job in 1980 purely on the fact of having made an 'A' in his structural geology class. It also helped that my boss had been a former graduate student of my fathers. At present, I'm working as an analytical chemist in a local environmental laboratory. I was born August 9, 1956. I'm the oldest of three full brothers and a sister. I come from Irish(50%) Scottish(25%) English(25%) stock on both sides of the family. I've a pretty long memory thats not as fast as I would like. I'm left-handed, 5'11.5" in height, weight 228, hazel eyes, started out very blond, but now have brown hair starting to grey. We moved 8 times before 8th grade but finally settled down when we got to El Paso, TX. I started 7th grade there at Zach White middle school. My uncle Ed was a physicist and taught at Boston University. When I found out what physics was I assumed I would eventually be a physicist. I scored well on all sorts of academic tests growing up. But I learned to fly under the radar early in life. I've always been a B student. So, as a freshman and sophmore at Jesuit high school, I tested into the the 'R' (smarty pants) class. Unlike the public high schools, Jesuit made students take Chemistry before they took Physics. As a sophmore I did a deal with my Latin teacher. As it turned out, he had a degree in organic chemistry. I was fascinated by the way symbols, simple rules, and transformations could construct things that were true about actual compounds. He tutored me in chemistry and in exchange I learned enough latin to barely pass. As a sophmore, I scored first card in chemistry because I liked it. They gave us a test and I tested up to college level in chemistry. It was beginning to look like chemistry was going to be my thing for life. Jesuit went under financially and I transfered to Coronado high school. I took the PSAT/NMSQT as a high school junior in 1973 and if I recall correctly, scored 194 out of 200 but I did not get a certificate because, duh, I put down 1973 as my graduation year. I took my SAT as a high school senior in 1974 and scored 600 Math and 740 Verbal. My classmates were very surprised that I scored that well. I knew a guy in my graduating class, from church, it was rumored that he scored a 1600 composite. So, there were plenty of smart kids there but you could not tell by looking at them. When I took my GRE in 1979, I scored 670 verbal, 620 quantatitative, 530 analytical. The correlation of SAT with IQ was still pretty good back then so it may be that I have an IQ in the neighborhood of 136 by GRE or 141 by SAT depending on which test score you choose). That and a lot of persistance (an unsung virtue) and the very high quality of my advisors, friends, and fellow grad students was enough to get me through grad school. Intelligence is variable and incomplete in interesting ways. My Physical Chemistry professor once asked me if I had a learning disability. He said, based on the questions I asked, that I knew things I should not understand, and did not know things I should. In hindsight, thats the weirdness of intuition. I have also noticed, I grasp things much more easily when I read them than when I hear them. Words also get very subtle changes in meaning in context so that the same phrases have slightly different meanings from one chaper or book to the next and from one reading to the next. Learning is intensely contextual. QED, the answer to the right simple question has far reaching implications. Thats why its so important in my opinion to be very careful what you tell the first year student in any disipline. Imagination can take that first exposure to an idea and extrapolate them very far. Well, I go crazy trying to convey exactly what I want to say. I suspect that I scored so well on verbals in testing because I had to take Latin in highschool and because from an early age I've been an avid reader. I average several books a week, unless distracted by other priorities. I read 60-90 pages per hour so the average paperback lasts 6-10 hours. I tend to be a night owl, so I steal a few hours every night. I have 1500-2000 titles I've collected of favorite authors. My favorite book catagories are Science Fiction and Fantasy. I've started a Current Music and Reading page. I like to try and capture feelings with words. I write some Poetry which my friends have encouraged me to post. I started to college in the fall of 1974 at the University of Texas at El Paso. My father quite teaching Geology there and moved with the rest of the family to Grand Junction, Colorado in the spring of 1975. I was a Chemistry major and took a BS in Science in 1979. Next I decided the quantitative mathematics of continuing in advanced chemistry were becoming too hard. There I was taking structure of matter, quantum mechanics, and auditing Milton's Paradise Lost. I switched departments to Geology where I earned a MS in Geology with a Chemistry minor in 1986. During the latter half of that interval, I worked for three years as an analytical chemist for Phelps Dodge Refining Corp from 1983 to 1986. I decided I wanted to learn more. I transfered to Texas Tech University and earned a PhD in Geology in 1994. I worked the last two years in Lubbock as an analytical chemist. I moved to Albuquerque, NM where I worked four more years as an analytical chemist and then did Post Doctoral study for 4 years at the University of Idaho. Coincidentally, Moscow is where I grew up from kindergarten through third grade and where my father had been the first to earn his PhD in Geology at the University of Idaho. After the post doc, I could not find an academic job that suited me. I moved to Grand Junction, CO where I have worked another five years as an analytical chemist. I'm not much interested in American football but I can watch a game and enjoy it. When I was 10, I liked playing soccer when we lived in Windhoek, Namabia. I played basketball in high school for a church team. I like playing softball in casual games. I like watching live games of baseball and soccer. But I'm not real wild about playing super competitive games because then I usually get left on the bench, bleh. When I captain a team, I tend to pick the 'loser' types that nobody else wants but that seem to me to have good potential for cooperation. We may not win the game but we play another game of cooperating as a team and seeing if we can win against a bunch of grandstanding hot doggers. I was on my high school swim team for a year and still like swimming very much. I had to quit abruptly when I developed a severe case of pneumonia. My doctor at the time suggested that pool chlorination made me too susceptible to resperatory infections. I hike for exercise but I can only swim in outdoor pools during the summer because chlorination really gets to me. I should say more about hiking. I've done it off and on since high school and quite a bit doing field work. Gradually it has become a regular thing. I really, really like to hike. Thats me (center top picture) at the summit of Mt Lincoln @14286 feet in Sept 13, 2001. I like high altitude semi-arid climates and think the western slope of Colorado is perfect. I've played the flute by ear since highschool but have mostly neglected to practice. Growing older, I seem to have lost my chops for flute. I guess older lips need exercise to play a flute. I have a nice Epiphone acoustic guitar, a Peavy Patriot electric guitar and a Peavy Backstage Plus amp and I plink a bit. I took lessons in grade school but abandoned them when it became clear my younger brother had huge gobs of natural talent. He was taking lessons from the best teachers in the city within a year. In the face of that, I figured I was not going to become much of a musician. Many years later, I am starting to find a real appreciation for the little bit that I can play and I'm enjoying that. Also, I am in a church choir in which I sing baratone. I like rock and roll with a strong blues influence (e.g. Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, The Doors, Neil Young) Not really in a catagory but, I like The Eagles, Aerosmith, Journey, Dread Zeppelin, and The Red Elvises. I also like female vocalists (e.g. Grace Slick, Sarah McLaughlin, Stevie Nicks, Joni Mitchael) and Irish bands (e.g. The Cranberries, Snow Patrol, KT Tunstall, U2, Steeleye Span, and The Chieftains). I also like some of the Baroque classics; Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Handel's Water Music, Berlioz Symphonie fantastique, Pachelbel's Canon, and more recently, Mahler, and Benjamin Britten's War Requiem which incorporates Wilfred Owen's war poetry. But I have their music only on vinyl. Pets? We had all kinds of the bird, turtle, lizard, snake, rodent variety. We kept Morgan horses from childhood up through high school. I used to ride often with a bareback pad and western snaffle bit. Dogs are OK and pretty cool but I'm more of a cat person. We have had a succession of mellow siamese cats. I have kept one or more fish tanks since 7th grade. Mostly, I now keep dwarf african chiclids because they are good parents and very territorial, but rarely kill one another which makes for interesting interactions across the various territorial boundaries. Most apartment owners that would object to dogs and cats will allow fish. Adult Dwarf Cichlids are small enough that you can have a very nice assemblage in a 60 gallon tank. I like to cook, almost anything with green chili (stews, enchiladas, chicken), stir-fry, hot curries, and Italian. I like a grilled london broil but typically go for chicken in day to day meals. I like a lot of vegtables and I make an awesome salad at need. I get my fruits in with cold oatmeal and frozen fruit for breakfast. I like strong tea but prefer strong coffee, I have 1-2 glasses of wine a day. I like dry reds like Cab Sav's and Zin's, Dark (not sweet) beers, porters, or stouts (Guinness Stout), and smokey single malt scotch. I have'nt had a good scotch for many years now. Its just too expensive. When I am not reading or working, but especially when I am working, I like to use and tinker with computers. I used to be a big OS/2 fan but now at work must run Win98, WinNT, W2KPro, or WinXP for windows applications at work. I find that troubleshooting operating system snags are more interesting than actual computer games so I guess that makes me a geek of sorts (-: You can see whats current in my geek life at Geek's Corner For gaming, I really used to love playing Magic and D&D. They are more particapatory and leave more to the imagination. Plus, you are cooperating with intelligent friends against actual intelligent opponents. The structure of game rules and inculsion of chance and probability makes the game more interesting and more realistic. I first learned to program on a Monroe desktop calculator as a junior in highschool in 1973. I would not have passed Algebra without it. Our teacher allowed us to use the calculator (programmable by magnetic strip if I remember correctly) if we had a program ready to go during the test and turned in a printout of the program code along with our answer. Naturally, I coded every problem type we might get on a test and did every problem on the tests on the Monroe calculator. Later our teacher taught us to write FORTRAN and ran our codes once a week and brought us the results. So, FORTRAN was my first language. In college as a freshman at UT El Paso, I quickly acquired an account and began writing FORTRAN with punched card decks for the IBM 360 they had at the time. It was fun to see how much resources one could tie up with one program. Early on, we could only request up to 512K bytes of core memory. I spent enormous amounts of time scrutinizing the very long stack of error codes manuals for FORTRAN IV G and H. System 360 JCL was fun to learn and by then as a masters student I found that reading the data off the tapes onto reserved cylinders and then doing system sorts was faster than doing it in FORTRAN for the relatively large data sets (60000 records) I used. I learned and quickly forgot BASIC as necessary for small jobs. SPSS was available about then and I used it frequently. In 1983 I bought my first PC, a Compaq DeskPro. Upgrading from 512 to 640K of 120ns DRAM was a $256 option. I bought the 8087 math co-processor just a bit later. They talked about but never came out with an I/O coprocessor. I bought two TallTree Systems JRAM cards and put 2Mb of 100ns DRAM on each of them. Then I had a massive 704K of DOS memory to run my programs and 4Mb of ram disk for fast FORTRAN compiles and disk access. I tried and quickly rejected Windows (what a loser!) in favor of Double DOS and then moved on to Quarterdecks DesqView for my multitasking needs. I got a modem and from then on did all my computing from home. I wrote my MS thesis and the FORTRAN code to crunch it at home and printed it off on the mainframe as needed. I bought my first hard drive in 1986; 20Mb for $500. I upgraded the bios on my DeskPro and put in the NEC V30 8086 chip and got a 256 greyscale monitor. I bought this weird ide controller card that did special encoding and turned two ST-251 40Mb drives into 80Mb drives. Finally, about 1992 I bought my first 40MHz AMD 80486 and motherboard. Man! it was so fast compared to my old 8086!! a few months later I was using OS/2. I went through a couple more 486 boards. My first overclock was running my 80MHz AMD 80486 at 100MHz on a Vesa Local Bus (VLB) board with a 50MHz bus speed. I gave those away along with the processors. My last 486 machine, a 120 MHz AMD 80486 VLB (3x40MHz) based setup, is now retired to my mothers for her use. I've lost count of how many PC's I have put together from salvaged parts at my various jobs and for fun. Over time I have come to like some brands particularly well. My first socket 7 board was a Tyan Tomcat I and a 133MHz Pentium. The Tomcat was based on the Intel HX chipset and had 512K cache; very fast and expandable for its time (1994-1996). Then I had to get myself an overclockable motherboard. I have bought and installed several motherboards based on the VIA chipsets made by FIC. The PA-2007 motherboard based on the VIA VP2 chipset was superior to the Intel TX and HX chipset motherboards. The PA-2007 overclocked the P133 to 150MHz just fine with a 75MHz bus speed. I decided to buy a 233MHz AMD K6 CPU. It overclocked at 266 MHz on the PA-2007 very nicely. I retired my Tyan Tomcat because it could not support the new AMD K6 line of processors. The PA-2012 was my first ATX board and I had to get my first ATX case along with a 300MHz AMD K6-2 CPU. It ran pretty well but not as well as the PA-2007. The PA-2012 was just unstable in general. I stored it and later traded it for $50 off the price of a FIC VA-503+ for my sister and good riddance. I gave my sister my first AMD 233MHz K6 CPU to go with the FIC VA-503+ board for Xmas 1999. A nice upgrade from her P75 and generic Quantex motherboard. I upgraded to an FIC PA-2013 with 1Mb cache and an AMD K6-3 450MHz 2.4V CPU. Later I made a second upgrade system with a TYAN Trinity 1598C2 (2Mb cache) and a second AMD K6-3 450MHz 2.2V CPU. The Trinity was the last of the socket 7 boards I have purchased and by far the fastest and most stable. Finally, this spring 2000 I bought the Abit KA7 and KA7-100 and an Athlon 700 CPU. I now have the Abit KA7-100, TYAN Trinity 1598C2 / AMD 450MHz K6-3, FIC PA-2013 / AMD 450MHz K6-3, and a PA-2007 / 300MHz AMD K6-2 currently in use. I still have the TYAN Tomcat motherboard and a cheaply acquired dual P133 / Adaptec 2940UW Gigabyte server motherboard sitting around gathering dust. In a parallel development I gradually went SCSI starting in 1994 with a QLogic narrow SCSI adapter to go with my first CDROM, a Plextor 4-Plex. Then I got a Seagate 4LP Barracuda 4.5 Gb UW drive and an Adaptec 2940UW adaptor to go with my PA-2007. About the same time I got the FIC PA-2013 board; I also got an Adaptec 3950U2 SCSI controller. This was mostly because I was at the end of my rope getting my Fujitsu MO drive to not suck all performance from my hard disk subsystems. I've built many more and more advanced systems and they are documented at the link to Ghostwheel at Geek's Corner. |