High School

I was at Larry Chow's house one time when I saw a computer for the first time. He had an Apple IIe in his room. He showed me a few of the simple programs that he had implemented on it. My eyes were opened like nothing I had ever experienced before. When I got home, I let my parents know all about it, and how important it was for our family to get a computer too. It was hard to convince them. Thinking back, it was a magical time. From then on, computers and games took over large parts of my life.

I had a few close friends in High School. We all ate together at lunch. I reconnected with many of them later in life and they remain friends to this day. Besides the board games that we played in middle school (like Risk, Stratego, and Monopoly) we started playing a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons opened a whole new world for me and it was largely fueled by all the fantasy books I had read and continued to read.

I remember my first experience playing dungeons and dragons quite vividly. There was a thrill in realizing just how open-ended the game was - anything was possible. My friend John knew about the game from his older sister Sue. She and her friends seemed like the cool kids to us, and they played regularly. I bought all the books that went with the game and read them repeatedly. I memorized much of what was in those volumes. On one occasion, Sue and her friends invited John and me to participate in their campaign. It was only for an evening, but it left a lasting impression on me. I got to see how a real campaign could be run. It was so exciting to play with the older kids. They were probably just juniors and seniors in HS, but they seemed like adults to us. The Dungeon Master (DM) had the group split into separate groups in order to solve some quest. Half the party went to another room with a co-DM for an hour or so as they played independently. At some point the DMs had the 2 parties rejoin for the climax as we encountered a final challenge. It was incredible.

I spent many hours during the summers programming games of different sorts. My first computer was a TI99 4A with 16K of memory. It cost about $100 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. I don't have that original game anymore, but it was similar to this Hammurabi game.

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. For more information about my origin story read my career day speech that never happened.

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 (as did my mother). I 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 did the work on weekends and over holidays, since, as usual, school kept interrupting the things that I really wanted to do. Throughout my career, I continued to work on similar projects on the weekends. The only difference then was that it was a job interrupting what I really wanted to do instead of school. Fortunately work and even school became much closer to what I really wanted to do, but was never quite exactly aligned.

I started programmin with BASIC, but Turbo Pascal was a huge advancement. The text was color coded, code was modular and organized, compilation was near instantaneous - and it ran fast! The structured nature of Turbo Pascal allowed me to write much large programs to tackle more ambitious projects. I lay on the ground for hours just dreaming of all the things that I could do

Sometimes my mother took me inteo Ball Labs in Murray Hill, where she worked, in order to speak with researchers there, or listen to lecturs from prominant scientists. Some of those presentations were about fractals. I spent a lot of time programming different forms of fractals and cellular automation.

On Saturday mornings, I woke up with my head filled with all kinds of ideas for fantastic worlds and dungeon campaigns. I also thought about how I could use the computer to handle the book-keeping. I'd map maps and design grand adventures. We played a lot, but never as much as I wanted because school kept interrupting. On Sundays, at church, my mind was in fantasy worlds or thinking of ideas for computer projects instead of listening to the sermons or singing. I was always thinking about what I would do when I got home.

Early in high school I made a conscious decision to do only things that would be a long-term positive investment in my future. That meant studying hard, getting good grades, and exercising. I lifted weights with Bill Keese, participated in track, practiced karate, and took all the AP and honors classes that I could. That decision meant foregoing a lot of social activities and watching TV. I never felt tempted to drink, smoke, or try drugs — those felt like obvious bad choices that were not going to yield positive future outcomes. These nerdy pastimes combined with hormones and endorphins were already a powerful drug to me. I didn't think these choices were particularly hard. What is hard to understand is why more young people do not make similar choices.

I really enjoyed those years. The combination of fantasy, friends, and computers stoked my imagination in ways that are hard to recapture as an adult.

School was fun - especially when I learned that taking the honors and AP classes was actually much better than taking the average level classes that I had taken the first year or two of high school. I was fortunate to fall in with friends that were smart and dedicated to learning. It provided positive peer pressure instead of the negative sort that is more common. My lab partner in freshman biology was Larry Chow. Larry is now a prominent radiologist. At the time, he was just a clever, funny, smart student. We had fun and he inspired me to perform better in class than I would have otherwise. Sitting behind us was Monica Crowley and Sue Byrn. They were also very smart and a positive influence. Monica now serves in the Trump administration as chief of protocol. Our biology teacher was Jeff Charney. His stoic style and computer HAL were just what we needed to learn biology at this time in our lives.

The martial arts have always fascinated me. In middle school and all through high school 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 karate - 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 continued with the program until I graduated High School. When I first started, the instructor was Carol Tarantino.

I would go very early in the morning and stay through all four classes and go home sweaty at about 1 PM on Saturdays. I learned lots of katas (most of which I have forgotten today). I punched and kicked the heavy bag a lot. 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. Most of the work I did for them was mundane data entry into Lotus, taking calls, and some envelope stuffing. I wrote a mailing list program for them in Pascal which they used for many years after I left. When the boss learned that I had written some software for them, he called me into his office and gave me a 12% raise. My pay went from $4/hour to $4.50. It felt good.

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 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 honors trigonometry and pre-calculus. 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. Though I would not consider myself a math whiz at all, 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. The humanities classes weren't for me, but I managed to muddle through them. Later in life, however, I've become quite interested in macroeconomics and its history.