Short version

I was born in Kansas City (year of the rat, house of the lion), grew up outside Kansas City, went to college in a small Minnesota town, and since then I’ve been living in and around San Francisco. I work for a product design consulting company called Cooper, where I work on teams that design stuff like glucose meters for nurses, online investment tools, computer-assisted surgical applications for joint replacements, and neurosurgical planning tools. (I can’t resist: Sometimes design is brain surgery). Bam!

Really long version

When I say “in and around” San Francisco, I mean that I’ve lived in a lot of different places. In the first seven years alone, I lived in 14 different structures: 9 apartments, 3 houses, and 2 trailers. These were scattered around the Bay Area: SF, Berkeley, Oakland, Marin, and who can forget, San Jose. Within SF, I’ve bounced around the Mission, in four apartments between 14th and 20th Streets (plus another in the Lower Haight).

This is a little infographic that I drew in September of 2000 in an attempt to figure out how often I’d actually paid rent. Turns out, not so much of the time. (Thanks Ted, Lynne, and Steve). More recently, I created a Google Map that locates and describes all the places I’ve lived in the Bay Area (15 so far).

When I first moved to San Francisco, I wanted to be a writer. For a while, I wrote constantly, and wasted a lot of stamps trying to get people to read it. Eventually, I got bored of waiting to be discovered. Actually, I ran out of money; then, I ran out of credit. So I got a job at a small publishing house where I went through various post-college embarrassments — watching others do the real work while I un-jammed the fax machine and walked documents between buildings.

This all changed one fall afternoon when I decided to take a job on a farm. Some friends were going to a picnic at an organic vegetable farm in Bolinas, a small town north of San Francisco. Bolinas is known for its insularity, eccentricity and lawlessness, and for its large organic farms. I tagged along, and a month later, I was moving out of my city apartment, giving away a lot of stuff, loading pumpkins into the back of a truck and living in an Airstream trailer. Good times.

Over the course of the next few months, I enjoyed the fresh air, fresh food, and Cypress Hill, the field music of choice among my fellow farmers. When the rainy season came along, I took a job at an environmental education center called Slide Ranch, located a few miles down the coast near Muir Beach. After that, I bounced around for a while. I coordinated a literacy program at an Oakland homeless service agency (before the organization ran afoul of federal regulators), worked with recently adjudicated high school kids at a job skills program in West Oakland, and developed gallery demonstrations and exhibits at a science museum.

For the past five years, I’ve worked for Cooper, a product design consulting company. Cooper was founded in the early nineties by Alan Cooper, a software developer and author of a couple [1, 2] of influential books about software design. The company began as “Cooper Software,” but became “Cooper Interaction Design” to emphasize our focus on the design portion of the software product development process. Today, we’re just “Cooper,” and we supplement the simple name with the slogan “product design for a digital world.” We design interactive products of all varieties: strictly software products like web sites and applications, and software/hardware combinations like handheld devices, glucose meters, infusion pumps, and so on. Work-wise, Cooper is cool because of the continual focus on creative stuff, problem-solving, and writing. Plus, I’ve been able to work on a variety of interesting projects - get the full list here - which is always nice.