Mail Address: xanthian@well.com Registered at The WELL: Sun Jul 31 21:53:33 1988 This document last revised: 2008/09/09 (so you know how stale it is). Where I live: in a small apartment about 200 yards south east of the south-east corner of Arizona State University's main campus, in Tempe, Arizona. Personal Computers: HP Pavilion ze5170 laptop "brokenputer", running the SimplyMEPIS flavor of Debian Linux; screaming machine, gasping from hard drive and power cord failures, though, so no longer "laptopable". I keep it at work, and a $10-used PS200 generation Intel box by Gateway, "slowputer", at home, an apartment, running the same OS, but ten times slower. So happy to have gotten MS-Windows out of my life, I'm doing a little jig of sorrow to say "goodbye". That situation didn't last, brokenputer bit the dust once and for all (though slowputer still ticks on), and after the recoverable data was copied from the brokenputer hard drive to an external hard drive, brokenputer joined the other trash in a nearby dumpster. SimplyMEPIS disappeared with it, its mouse support was awful. My new-as-of 2006/04/15 HP Pavilion dv5000 widescreen laptop "xanth_jr" is still running MS-Windows Xp until I can find a way to make it double boot from an external hard drive. Now that task has also been accomplished, and xanth_jr uses GRUB to do multi-OS boots among MS-Windows XP, a recovery copy of that OS, and Ubuntu Linux. Personal stuff: Currently characterized by: Amateur author Computer Graphics Programming Practitioner Computer Language Studies Addict Equal Rights Advocate for race, gender, gender preference, religion, ethnicity, nationality, income level, cultural maturity, disability, chronic illness, body muscle/fat ratio, and other differences used as bases for unfair discrimination in today's world Geezer father of John Grayson "Johnny" Dolan, born 2006/01/05, and three adult children, Jacob Hanson Dolan, born 1973/08/24, Nathan Winslow Dolan, born 1976/07/15 (maybe) and Elizabeth Doris Dolan Perkins, born 1979/10/10 Grandfather to Nathan Winslow Dolan, Jr., born 1995/02/??, and Maya Aimee Dolan (Jake's daughter), born 2006/04/22 Fiancee and caregiver to Jeanette Jane Neuharth Rieder, music teacher for 21 years or so, 6 years of other employment when teaching jobs were sparse, divorcee, and more recently, brain tumor survivor. Long term homeless and unemployed person, now a retired and housed person, thanks to a long term bequest and police assistance. Perpetual Computer Science Student "Professional" Usenet News poster Student level American Sign Language practitioner In the past, characterized by: Amiga computer user Birthright Party candidate for US president Duplicate bridge player, no particular merit MT1(SS), USN, 4.0 sailor Retired USNOAA Corps LCDR, never to be a manager again! Guitar, flute, penny whistle, recorder, piano, ocarina, mouth-harp, trumpet, and bugle player ... all played very, very badly Scuba diver, paid professional Stained glass hobbiest Standards technical committee ANSI X3H3 (Computer Graphics Programming Languages) voting member, 4.5 years Scientific Data Processing Programmer Submariner Tropical fresh water fish raiser Very amateur sailboat sailor, barely able to stay upright Co-founder in 1963 of Reformed North American Druidism. To my utter astonishment, me being by now an atheist and the founding having been done as a lark to escape mandatory chapel attendance in college, it is still alive almost 40 years later and now international in scope. You may bury me cheek by jowl with L. Ron Hubbard, another lout whose religion founded in jest grew to overshadow him. Politics: My life plan is, within the limits of my ability, to help save, preserve, strengthen, enhance, unify, defend, and disperse the human species through political efforts in support of a widening, commercial space program of exploration, exploitation, and settlement. Persons interested in combining forces in such a program are invited to join and revive/support the Birthright Party. "The birthright of humankind is the stars!" Work stuff: Status: Frequently (usually?) unemployed, job hunting, doing sometimes "permanent", sometimes contracting stuff. I suffer fools with totally insufficient glee, thenceforth come short job durations. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/SkinnyResume.txt is my most current resume; I'm probably retired, so only a really good == worthwhile and "contribution to humankind" type of job would be of interest. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/resume_supplements.html shows my current jobsearch status, if anyone cares; links below show some current software efforts. Email: xanthian@well.com (Kent Paul Dolan) xanthian_kpd@yahoo.com Skills: Programming in Ada, antique assembly languages, C, C++, COBOL, Fortran, Java, Modula-2, Logo, Pascal, Perl5, PL/1, around twelve dozen total languages learned, used professionally and mostly mercifully forgotten. Programming for computer graphics, GUIs, text processing, number crunching, network management software, real time embedded software, satellite telephony software (three different recent jobs; ye gods!), e-commerce, genetic algorithms. Programming under many flavors of Unix, Cygwin, pSOS, MS-DOS, MS-Windows, VMS, AmigaDOS, OS/360 & descendents. Software planning, design, development, and maintenance (but _not_ large system architecture, which is beyond my skill set). New technology assesment, transition planning and transition implementation supervision. Software and hardware requirements specification, functional specification, procurement, and implementation supervision. Hobbies: Deriving and implementing software numerical heuristic solutions for NP-Complete problems. See freebie stuff under http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/public/code/StarLogo/BTSP/ http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/java/TravellerDoc.html for examples of genetic / memetic algorithms applied this way. "Art" derived from the latter, see: http://www.anycities.com/user/xanthian/ [Nope, that's dead for now, Anycities went belly up without notice, rose from the flames after discarding all user data; maybe I'll post it again if The WELL ups its per user free disk allowance to a gigabyte or so.] Writing parsing scripts for highly complex data agglomerations (like free form Usenet job ad postings) in Perl5, sed, nawk, AmigaDOS scripts, ksh, csh, etc. Cellular Automata research and CA goofing off software, with now realized intentions of branching this off into genetic algorithms with a CA flavor. I ended up doing genetic algorithms, but not about CAs so far; see Traveller stuff above and also http://www.anycities.com/user/xanthian/MovieScheduler/MovieScheduler.html [Again, missing in action for now.] Discovering and implementing new data compression algorithms (nothing earthshaking). Computer game design software tools implementation. Mentoring and statistics gathering and analysis for Usenet job ad newsgroups (suspended, for now), to the once intense annoyance and discomfort of my ISP. Sometims funding his upkeep, but no longer raising my grade-school son John Grayson Dolan, born 5 January 1996, (and me born 14 December 1943; "God is an Iron") who is with my ex-spouse, Julie Anne Farnham Dolan, no spring chick herself having passed age 57 at this writing (DOB 20 Feb 1951). Noticing that I now have over a hundred sixty link pages for web sites, I guess I'd better call that a hobby too, so others won't choose to call it an obsession. http://www.well.com/user/xanthian/ will get you started. This stuff is addictive, and at the same time as boring as watching paint fade; prowl at your own risk. Kent, the man from xanth.