High School

I had a few close friends in High School. I can remember playing games like Risk, Stratego, and Dungeons and Dragons. I read a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy books.

I discovered computers early in HS and spent many hours during the summer programming games of different sorts. My first computer was a TI99 4A with 16K of memory. It cost about $100 dollars and I hooked it up to my 13-inch black and white TV. I used it so much, I'm surprised it didn't wear out. One of the first games I made (sometime in 1983) was a city simulation game. You owned a medieval city and competed with neighboring cities. You allocated money to planting crops and buying weapons and other activities. There were a lot of parameters to adjust. You had to find the right balance to win. Much of my early programming was in Turbo Pascal. My parents refused to buy me any computer games or game consoles, so I was forced to create all my games on my own. I am eternally grateful to them for depriving me of that short-term gratification. It is so much more satisfying to create your own game than play someone else's. Since my mother was a statistical programmer at Bell Labs, I found it easy to speak with her about math and the different programming projects that I took on.

My early programming projects were in BASIC and Turbo Pascal. When I got an IBM PC Junior around Sophomore year of High School, I read the whole BASIC manual, and created games like Mastermind, the city simulation, interactive adventure stories, and other simple things. With Turbo Pascal, I worked on projects like the graphical comparison of sorting algorithm performance, expression parsing into a binary tree, unbeatable tic-tac-toe, fractal generators, and lots of other things. I can remember thinking about what projects to create when I was at church service on Sundays instead of the sermon.

The martial arts have always fascinated me. When I was young I attended a Saturday adult school program for Karate taught by Sensei Karvel Thornber. Sensei Thornber was a physicist at AT&T Bell Laboratories; karate was his hobby. The style was Modified Ninja Isshinryu karate. It was actually a hodgepodge of a lot of things including Shotokan - I was to later learn. I don't think we learned any actual ninjitsu - that was probably thrown into the name to attract more students. His instructor was Joe Versoki. I started this program when I was in 3rd grade, and except for a few years, I continued with it until I graduated High School. When I first started, the instructor was Carol Tarantino. Sensei Thornber took over for her when I was in middle school. I would go very early in the morning and stay through all four classes and go home at about 1 PM on Saturdays. I learned lots of katas (most of which I have forgotten today). Around this time I read a book in the library called Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere. At the time there was nowhere around to practice it. This book was probably what caused me to seek and practice Aikido when I had an opportunity later in college.

I worked part-time during my senior year at a small life Insurance company called Hartstein Associates. I wrote a mailing list program for them in Pascal which they used for many years after I left. Most of the work I did for them was mundane data entry into Lotus, taking calls, and some envelope stuffing.

In June 1986 I graduated from Watchung Hills Regional High School in NJ. I was 6th in my class of 350. One of my best friends, Bill Keese, was valedictorian. We both took AP computer science with Mr. Momberg as seniors. It was a great experience. We both got 5's on the AP exam (AB version). This was the 3rd year it was offered by the College Board. In 2009 the AB version of the exam was dropped due to the low number of students taking it. The "A" version of the exam, which is what is offered today, has a reduced scope. It just covers the Java language, and lacks coverage of many algorithms and data structures. Years later, Bill and I would work at competing software companies (he at BroadBase/Kana, me at Blue Martini Software) in Silicon Valley. We saw each other pretty often from 1996 to 2002. We learned to play Go together in 1997 at the Palo Alto Go club, and continue to play each other regularly to this day - even though Bill moved to Japan around 2002.

High school was a pretty positive experience overall. I wish I had had the courage to date girls during that time, but that was something I didn't feel ready to do until much later. I had a lot of really great teachers. I remember when I was a freshman I got a C in the mid-level algebra class. Sophomore year I took regular Geometry. The teacher got pregnant at the start of the year, and a substitute taught the rest of the year. It wasn't good. Bill was in the honors class and told me stories that made me think that they were having a much better time in that class. In my junior year, I decided to take the honors trigonometry and pre-calculus class. We had a great teacher, Stanton Benson, and there were a lot of very bright students in the class. It changed my life. I did better and learned more in that class than I ever did in the "easier" classes I had taken previously. I would not consider myself a math whiz at all, but my eyes were opened to the wonder and challenge of mathematics as a result of these early experiences. I had similar positive experiences taking the honors computer science (Mr. Momberg), and calculus (Alice Richmond) classes in my senior year. I took many advanced placement classes and did quite well on the exams - saving my parents a lot of dough on college tuition by earning quite a few college credits. I never enjoyed humanities classes much, but I managed to muddle through them. Later in life, however, I've become quite interested in economics and its history.