User:Paul R. Potts

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This is the user page for Paul Richard Potts (date of birth 26 Sep 1967). I'm not famous, but this is my (short form) autobiography (so far):

I was born in Seattle, Washington; when my parents divorced around 1970, my mother moved to North East, Pennsylvania (a small town east of Erie), where her parents were living, and found work as an Occupational Therapist at Hamot Hospital's Mental Health department. My younger brother and I grew up in a trailer park in North East, a somewhat cramped environment for children. After Montessori kindergarten, I attended public schools through third grade, then the Erie Day School from 3rd through 6th grade. I read early and far above grade level, was tested at a very high I.Q., and was considered a gifted student, although in my personal experience, telling a child he or she is "gifted" is a recipe for disaster. But I was also so physically uncoordinated that it was thought I might have a neurological disability; I was given physical therapy, and suffered chronic allergies (I know now that in addition to pollen I was allergic to cow's milk, but such a diagnosis was unheard of at the time and so I underwent years of allergy shots but showed no apparent improvement). I also had physical symptoms such as headaches and vomiting from anxiety, and had difficulty socializing, and a combative relationship with my younger brother, exacerbated by the lack of personal space.

Private school entailed an awkward regimen of several hours of commuting each day, and in rubbing shoulders with the children of bank presidents and business executives in Erie, as the child of a single mother growing up in a trailer, I became keenly aware of my lower social class (we were eligible for, and received, "government cheese" and money from Social Security; my mother received child support payments from my father irregularly; he was somewhat sporadically employed himself, and at the time legal enforcement of such things was practically a joke).

With an absent father, the role of male parent was filled in part by my mother's father, a chemist who sparked my interest in science and who was willing to take on the challenge of applying some discipline a very strong-willed child. Unfortunately, he died when I was about ten years old leaving that parental role again mostly empty; I learned to "self-parent" and became a lifetime auto-didact.

My mother remarried around 1979 to a considerably older man, a Polish-American World War II veteran with little formal education who worked at the General Electric plant, assembling motorized wheels, and we moved into a house in Harborcreek. Such a move would not have been possible without my stepfather's financial assistance, but we had a difficult relationship, especially as I got older. I also began to have occasional contact with my father, who at the time was a California hippie exploring religious cults in India.

After a taste of more advanced education, including the rudiments of algebra, in private school, with its uniforms and small classes, I was put back into Harborcreek Junior/Senior High School at the start of seventh grade. The crowds of students and large class sizes caused me considerable culture shock; I was set back several years in mathematics, having to start again with basic fractions and decimals. I was frequently bullied and beaten up. In High School I took advanced classes as available, including electives in Chemistry and Physics, which I enjoyed greatly, and found some excellent instruction in advanced classes in English, History, and Social Studies, but found the math instruction to be so poor that I dropped trigonometry, and thus graduated high school with only two years of algebra. My SAT tests were very skewed, with an extremely high score in English and only a moderately good score in math, although I professed (and still do profess) a great interest in math.

From a very young age I showed interest in computers, and used early home computers such as the Commodore PET and Apple II. I got my own computer, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1, around 1977, and taught myself BASIC and the rudiments of assembly language programming. This machine was eventually superseded by a Commodore 64, and I began to develop an interest in hacker subculture, cracking early copy-protected games. I had a great interest in science fiction and fantasy, In high school I wrote for an "APA" -- an amateur, photocopied science-fiction fanzine called "Tapadance." I began to receive some notice for my writing and put together articles for a local computer club newsletter, eventually giving a presentation to a room full of adult Commodore 64 fans. I also began playing guitar, starting with a garage-sale acoustic guitar and eventually playing a Fender Mustang with other misfits in garage bands. Not allowed to drive, I tended to be isolated from other kids my age. During my Junior High and High School years I worked at a series of jobs beginning with landscaping and moving to grocery store work. I always procrastinated terribly on school assignments, and wrote most papers in single all-nighters.

The cost of college was a contentious issue; it was not at all a foregone conclusion that I would even attend college. I was accepted at Kent State and the College of Wooster, but my mother wisely felt that I would be lost at the large state school. About this time I was involved in a fistfight with my stepfather, an incident I later turned into a short story. I was accepted a year early, and had finances allowed could have taken required classes in summer school and skipped my senior year of high school, but scholarship monies were not yet arranged and so I was stuck sleepwalking through my senior year (sometimes literally; as a senior in High School, I was working nearly full-time at a grocery store, and so would frequently work after school until ten or eleven p.m., watch the David Letterman show, get a scant five hours of sleep, and head back to school the next morning nearly asleep on my feet).

Granted several scholarships that helped lessen the cost, I attended the College of Wooster from 1985 to 1989. I found that my math background had not prepared me very well for my planned Computer Science major, and had to take remedial algebra; eventually, I had to change plans and major in my second love, English, because it was clear I would not be able to get through the required Calculus and Linear Algebra and other mathematics required for a Computer Science major.

At first very anxious about grades, I eventually began to feel more confident (after a first semester 4.0 average) and develop the social relationships I had mostly lacked in High School. I took on a variety of extracurricular activities such as the college radio station, where I served as a deejay, beginning with a late night New Age music show (continuing my night-owl tendencies), ultimately becoming Production Manager. I also worked several different jobs such as a writing tutor, and student-taught. I graduated with a B.A. in English while having also taken every Computer Science course I could manage. I also managed to teach myself C programming, get paid to develop some custom Macintosh software, teach myself all about desktop publishing, and publish a couple of articles on Macintosh programming for Washington Apple Pi magazine. I was awarded departmental honors in English and won the Stephen R. Donaldson prize for fiction. Wooster required a junior and senior independent study project. For my junior project, I wrote a long paper about the work of Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, rolling in ideas about nanotechnology and the "gray goo" problem. For my senior independent study I wrote a collection of ten short stories, incorporating my experience living with my father in Los Angeles in the summer of 1987. During the summer of 1988, I lived in Wooster in an off-campus apartment and worked nights as a custodian.

After graduation I worked as an intern for Academic Computing Services, along with two of my classmates. I was "Intern for Documentation," and completed a book-length "Guide to Networking at the College of Wooster," and started a newsletter for Academic Computing Services, which was still operating with the same name sixteen years later. Earning a very limited stipend, but armed with newly minted credit cards, I began to use credit card debt to fund a basic lifestyle off-campus. Debt was to become a significant problem, as I worked relatively low-paying jobs and had a tendency to spend far beyond my means, mostly on books and periodicals, although fortunately I owed only a relatively small amount in student loans.

In 1990 I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan with a friend. My first job upon arriving was a position with the Department of Anthropology, where I did word processing and wrote the department newsletter. After several months of non-stop typing at an ergonomically poor desk, I was afflicted with acute carpal tunnel syndrome in both wrists, which required months in splints to heal, and realized I quickly needed to change jobs. I was fortunately able to get a position with the now-defunct Office of Instructional Technology at the University of Michigan, where I developed instructional multimedia on the Macintosh and PC platform, including a simulation of an audiometer written in HyperCard and C, a videodisc-based tool to train nursing students about the side effects of antipsychotic drugs, and an award-winning program for business school students about optimizing plant operations. I was also able to develop some skills running workshops, and writing articles for the Information Technology Division's newsletter. I also did some freelance work for the National Science Teachers' Association.

In early 2003 I developed a great interest in Apple's new technology, the Newton PDA. I left the University of Michigan in early 2003 and moved to Maineville, Ohio (near Cincinatti) to take a job with Pharos Technologies as a Newton developer, working working long hours primarily as a tester on the Monsanto Infielder Crop Records system. During this period I also wrote a short run of articles on Newton programming which appeared in specialized programming magazines. Pharos hit a speed bump and laid off many employees just three months later. I was one of them, so I moved back to Ann Arbor and took a job with Fry Multimedia.

As employee number 4 at Fry Multimedia. The World Wide Web was just coming into being, and Fry developed a number of early commercial web sites, including the eat.com site for Ragu, which featured a "How to Speak Italian" section, recorded by a co-worker. This site was profiled on NPR. Besides basic web development, I wrote some small prototype programs in the pre-1.0 Java language, served as a tester for Apple's Dylan language and programming environment, and worked on several prototype and demonstration projects including multimedia programs using SuperCard and C++, Newton programs, and a CD-ROM database product which indexed two gigabytes of data in compressed form, using a custom search engine implemented in about 10,000 lines of C++ code. This project, while it worked moderately well, never became a product, despite my best efforts in which I was frequently working 70 to 90 hours per week.

I left Fry Multimedia in 1995 to take a position with the newly developing Health Media Research Lab at the University of Michigan. The Health Media Research Lab was put together by Dr. Victor Strecher, and the mission was to use technology to advance health behavior change, under the banner of the University of Michigan's Comprehensive Cancer Center. I became the lead software developer and worked on software to support research projects, including a Newton "engine" to administer a variety of surveys. I also gained experience with WebObjects, Perl, C++, the PowerPlant framework from Metrowerks, and Macromedia Director. Over the course of the next 5 years I worked with the Health Media Research Lab on various projects and was eventually the technology team leader.

While these projects were largely successful and visible, my personal life was a disaster; embedded in misery and obsessive-compulsive behavior when not working, I began seeing a therapist and ended a long-term relationship, going through a series of antidepressant medications (Effexor, Serzone, Celexa, Zoloft, Welbutrin, and Prozac), spent two years in a somewhat tumultuous relationship; then, when that ended, for several years I did very little but work long hours, spending almost all my free time alone, doing little on my weekends but sleeping or playing video games or embarking on long, solitary road bike rides.

In 2000 I left the University to join InterConnect of Ann Arbor, a software services company working mainly on large web-based projects, with a variety of clients, but particularly for ProQuest, formerly Bell and Howell Information and Learning. At InterConnect, I worked mainly in Java, writing and debugging multi-tiered web applications, specializing particularly in the import process, which populated terabyte-size databases of text and images. I made significant improvements in the import process and used refactoring methodology to re-structure the code base, fixing many bugs along the way. Projects of particular note that were supported by my work included the Gerritsen Women's History collection and the Genealogy and Family History project.

In early 2000, having spent a year or so meeting single women via internet dating services, without much success, I met my wife-to-be, Grace. Starting 2000 overweight (just over 200 pounds) and still somewhat depressed, I joined with some friends and co-workers in putting on a series of raves in a privately rented loft in downtown Ann Arbor, complete with sound system, lasers, fog machines, lighting, artwork, custom invitations, and food. I was the deejay co-host of these parties, mixing house and trance music. This series of parties culminated in the Halloween 2000 party, an enormous event featuring a smoke-breathing dragon and giant robot.

As the dot-com boom peaked and then crashed, the decision was eventually made to close InterConnect. While looking around for my next job I did a little bit of volunteer teaching at Ann Arbor Learning Community. I taught three short "enrichment" classes: a class on Scheme programming (Scheme is a dialect of Lisp), and classes on Tolkien's "Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers."

From late 2000 through 2003 I worked with Aardvark Computer Services, initially working on integration of the Aardvark Q10 and other products with the Macintosh platform. This eventually turned into full-time work with Aardvark developing the GUI control panels and device drivers for both MacOS 9 and MacOS X, using Apple's IOKit framework and the Trolltech Qt framework. Introducing some process improvements, I also introduced the use of makefiles for the DSP code build process and CVS for revision control.

In (I think) early 2002 I began suffering from chest pain and eventually wound up hospitalized overnight for observation. Despite having health insurance, I wound up (while on oxygen and believing I was having a heart attack) choosing to go to a hospital that did not fully participate in the particular coverage plan, although I was told that they accepted my insurance. And so in what is an increasingly common occurrence even for the insured, I incurred huge fees (far higher than the fees than would have been billed to an insurer for each service), which then went to collection. Tests showed that I apparently only had acid reflux and erosion in my esophagus, but the significant increase in debt did nothing to reduce the stress level that had caused the incident in the first place.

Aardvark lad off the remaining development staff, leaving me as the only software developer, and I began working half-time due to the stress. Although I eventually completed working MacOS 9 and MacOS X drivers and control panels, this was not enough to turn around Aardvark's fortunes and the company closed; I filed for unemployment for the first time in my life and began to sell possessions to try to make ends meet.

On October 20th, 2001 Grace and I were married, and I became a parent, since she had a son, Isaac, age 5 (now 13).

In 2002 I began playing electric and acoustic guitar with the Sunday 5:00 mass at St. Francis Catholic Church, with band director Glenn Bugala. This was quite demanding and forced me to rapidly improve my skills as a guitarist. I also began studying Chapman Stick and occasionally used this instrument with the church band. The group was disbanded after a year.

In the fall of 2002 I began doing consulting work with MicroMax, a company in Canton. Continuing the embedded theme, I worked on a large documentation project for Delphi as the lead writer for the project, developing the template and process, and using code-comprehension tools such as Understand for C/C++.

We removed Isaac from public schools, where he was not thriving, and began homeschooling him.

With both of us entangled in considerable personal debt, and with no health insurance, since after my last experience I did not want to pay premiums for the coverage available through my employer, which I felt was unlikely to be worth the money when it came to an actual health crisis, Grace and I embarked on a consolidated debt payment plan with the eventual target of paying off all consumer debt by the end of 2006.

On October 29, 2004, Grace and I had a baby girl, Veronica Ruth Potts. While Medicaid covered the birth, they refused to cover most of her routine pediatric care for the first year, a situation we are still trying to contest.

When the Delphi documentation project ended, I was laid off, and had to file for unemployment benefits for the second time. I was then re-hired for a testing project with Visteon, where I did testing on a Sirius satellite radio project for PAG (Ford's "Premiere Automotive Group," which includes Land Rover, Volvo, and Jaguar). This required a daily commute to Dearborn, in the midst of a very active road construction. After spending a few months with Visteon, I could not tolerate the unpredictable commute any longer and took a job in the fall of 2005 with Lectronix, Inc. where I work today as a senior embedded software engineer.

I completed a podcast project involving a recording of William Hope Hodgson's novel The Boats of the Glen Carrig. I also recorded a review of Philip K. Dick's novel _A Scanner Darkly_, which was included in the science fiction podcast Escape Pod. I dedicated some effort to documenting Hodgson's life and work on Wikipedia, and wrote most of the material there on Hodgson's novels.

On October 14th, 2006, Grace and I had another baby, Samuel Ambrose Potts.

In 2007 I began playing the guitar again, studying with a teacher for the first time in over twenty years. Our consumer debt consolidation program is nearly complete despite an occasional setback, and family life with two young babies is exhausting, but rewarding. I will celebrate my fortieth birthday this fall. My health is good enough that I am classified as "preferred" for purposes of life insurance, as my weight has dropped to about 180. My depression has receded and I now take only St. John's Wort, fish oil, and niacin, although I will probably always be somewhat solitary and "moody," as my mother describes me, and "shy," as Grace describes me. With a nearby employer I am able to bike to work, even though I can't manage to find time to go to the gym.

My family web portal, with links to our Wiki and to my weblogs, can be found at http://thepottshouse.org.