Personal Information
I like to think of myself as a boundary spanner—bridging between "hard" science and "soft" skills. The bridge metaphor is attractive, but it probably implies more precision than I deserve (urban sprawl comes more to my mind). My "professional" degrees are in Civil Engineering (an undergraduate degree from the University of Utah; and a master’s and Ph.D. from Brigham Young University). I also have an undergraduate degree in English from the University of California at Berkeley, a master’s in Instructional and Performance Technology from Boise State University, and a master's in Technical Communication, also from Boise State. I completed a third undergraduate degree in Philosophy, from Boise State last year, and have more recently been taking graduate courses in creative writing (which I emphasized in my first undergraduate degree). I plan on taking a course in elementary Japanese in the fall.
I was born in southern California (Glendale). Here's
a picture of me circa 1960 with my sister Cheri, my mom, and my grandparents,
taken in our living room in Burbank (my grandparents lived in Rigby, Idaho).
We moved to
Santa Rosa (50 miles north of San Francisco) in 1963, where my two oldest
children were born. I became interested in photography in the late 1970's, and
this is a self-portrait I did around 1982 (I mostly photographed buildings, and
don't have many pictures of myself). I moved to the Uintah Mountains in Utah
during the summer of 1985, where my other three children were born, spent two
years teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi, before coming to Boise
State. I’ve been teaching soil mechanics and structural analysis and design at Boise State,
since the creation of its College of Engineering in 1996. Utah State offered
Susan (my wife, since 1985) a tenure, so she, David and Luella are living there,
with the rest of our extended family, with the exception of Cheri, who is still
in Santa Rosa.
My oldest son, Jesse, graduated from the University of Utah in Mechanical Engineering, and is working in Eastern Ohio, where he lives with his wife Angie (here's a link to his Youtube site). My second son, Eben, is living in Salt Lake City, works at Smith's, and plays in a power trio (with my absconded strat). My oldest daughter Sarah is going to school at BYU Idaho. Below is a picture of my little dog Sammy (also in Utah).
I haven't had a chance to pick up my guitar for a couple years. Maybe I'll get a chance play more, if the nights get boring. Anyway, here's a clip of what I like to play when I do. (ES-335, mostly blues). For those of you sufficiently tone-deaf, here's a short clip of me playing the piano.