He has more than 30 years of experience in the software industry in such diverse areas as large area microlithography, high-volume Website development, virtual private networks, and most recently he was a member of the Jini development team at Sun Microsystems helping to build a distributed computing model for Java. He is an avid minor league baseball fan (Lowell Spinners) and can be found dabbling in the amateur radio world (callsign NE1RD). He holds a B.A. in computer science from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.