Dan Keller's Perpetually - Under - Construction Home Page...
First: NO WAR!
in
Iraq or
Palestine or
Darfur or
anywhere else (I have an opinion
on just about everything political)... Ok, now my vital stats: in 2008 I moved to
Rome for a year,
and whenever I'm tempted to curse the mediocrity of American pop culture
I need only hear
Gattino Virgola,
I've got kids
(a daughter at
Lowell High School
in San Francisco (and in 2008-2009 at St. Stephen's... see below)
and a son at
Alameda High School
in Alameda -- they love 
sushi which I tell them to enjoy before
the oceans are completely lifeless 
...could it be that theirs is the last generation to eat wild-caught fish?),
for 22 years had a business
-- we pioneered
the paperless classroom
-- and I used to be a nursing student
(lots of
homework and diatribes... but
I finally
decided not to wear that hat)
and we must remedy the mediocrity of
post-secondary education (the good news is that
we can fix it),
rant endlessly,
wrote my first program on an 
IBM 360,
got a master's degree in
Medical Information Science
(here are some
reminiscences)
from 
UCSF where I was privileged to be advised by
Dr. Marsden Scott Blois,
a pioneer in
medical concept representation
and collected a few
autographs
of computing giants
but let's be careful not to
unleash a monster...
once had 
a
tricycle and later an
answering machine,
have been thinking about business
and real estate in Italy,
I did recently create
Wifi-Italia
and Italy's only free public Wifi site
(former Italian president 
Cossiga repeatedly pumped my hand, extolling wireless technology -- he's got three wifis in his house)
-- and here's my house (it has only two) 
and custom-built Sun Frost
appliances 
(yes, that's my kitchen on their web site) and was featured on
the cover of the Oct. 2004 SF Apartment magazine
and was the set for one episode of a short-lived TV series named
Partners in Crime (1984) starring Lynda Carter and Loni
Anderson,
but my favorite home was for two years the
MSO Lucid
(a surplused Korea-vintage Navy minesweeper)
-- house and boat in
San Francisco, a town with (at last!) a great mayor
and an
enlightened public health policy
(though we do have
earthquakes),
and in a
state
whose
economy is the world's sixth-largest
(Italy's is seventh; China's is eighth),
have become interested in 
cohousing,
and am fond of technology
but people are even more interesting so I
have volunteered at the 
UCSF Medical Center
(Long Hospital and medical records),
at the 
SF General Hospital
Emergency Room,
at the 
Glide Memorial clinic,
at the 
CPMC hospital Emergency Room,
and at the 
SF AIDS/HIV/HepC Nightline
(phone staffing),
and at the Tobacco
Education Center 
and have run
smoking cessation programs at
Kaiser sites in the Bay Area and at
Mills-Peninsula
-- read the interview
and a classic denial story)
and am now Factotum-in-Chief for 
Gary Heit's Americare Neurosurgery
International delivering equipment, training, and
high-tech medical care
to the third world (went in March, 2008, to Hue, Vietnam) and see that
in
California our hospitals themselves need life support
where Governor Boobengrabber's
"Kicking our nurses' butts" ...not!
(for this bad Governor
healthcare for the insurance companies' bottom lines is the only
healthcare that matters),
had a father
who was a painter and politico
and who did
the artwork
for this website and for
my company's training manuals (losing him in 2006
made a tough year even tougher),
have a mother
who is a filmmaker and playwright
(and she also wrote the story of Taxi,
the ferry-house dog),
have a sister 
Martheeenia --
who is (also) a great artist
with
a painting in New York's Metropolitan Museum
and her husband
Brad who is a designer for
Estee Lauder
and makes juice,
another sister who travels the world as the physical therapist for the
New York City Ballet
and for the Juilliard School and who invents
machines
to make dancers better
and is married to
Colter the Voiceover King
and my grandfather Sidney (my middle name)
invented the
Keller machine 
and the process
(called, oddly enough, Kellering) for creating dies to cast
curved steel surfaces (that made possible
streamlined cars) whereas
my other grandfather
(Herman Herschkowitz, renamed himself
Harry Herman at Ellis Island) came to America on Nov. 18, 1906,
aboard the 
S.S. Amerika,
have an apocalyptic vision of
inevitable and catastrophic
environmental collapse
(even the
Pentagon knows we're screwed...
we're headed for a long emergency
("America's oil consumption is the greatest misallocation of
resources in the history of the world... Suburbia is going to
fail. You can state that categorically..." says
James Kunstler
(one of my gurus) in America's
New Religion)
and we're
about to be blindsided by
peak oil
but here's 
a
glimmer of optimism)
have done projects for Silicon Valley companies including
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and 
and 
and 
and 
,
and have had a few
business
cards along the way, rely utterly on an antique
but marvelous piece of engineering --
HP's 200LX palmtop PC (it runs
DOS!), I still
write
HTML
by hand,
spend too much time administering this web site
(here's a neat dead
link finder),
a network and a
Cobalt server (my fault, not the Cobalt's) that lives in the cavernous,
air-conditioned, redundant-Cisco-routers-everywhere server farm
of
rock-solid ColoServe -- it's amazing what
people search for
in my search engine,
memorialized 
Bruce Borcherdt's Midas Niggard,
have been 
attacked by a crazed hacker,
have had my share of "customers from hell"
but, thankfully, none quite like
the infamous Thrasher
,
had a 
tour of the Artificial Intelligence Lab
and robotics workshops of MIT from my boyhood pal
Devon McCullough
and once patted a
Lisp Machine 
,
just discovered that pretty much everything I know
(e.g. what is 
spam
-- really! check it out!) has been collected in
a
single, succinct document -- yes! 
an IETF RFC!
(by the way, 
Death2Spam provides the best spam
filtering I've seen) -- and in California (which has
much
in
common with
Italy) I have a
Maas Aero
that I row at the splendid
Bair
Island Aquatic Center but here in Rome I row a 
Donoratico Tre -- I like adventure sports
-- diving, parachuting, etc. (here's
parasailing in Mexico) and when I swim laps
I listen to music on a
SwiMP3 (brilliant product!), have
cats
and Roman friends
(Leo and Marilena)
who, too, are devoted
cat people,
and here are links to my elementary school
(The
American Overseas School)
and (we visited in June, 2007) my high school (St.
Stephen's School) 
in Rome (where I grew up -- here's a
Rome
website maintained by Stuardt Clarke),
go back every year (here are pix from May, 2005),
have Roman friends who run the best ISP in Italy,
Agora Telematica
,
a quasi-Roman friend, Graeme Thomas, who won awards
for his stupendous web site
Kubrick 2001, The Space Odyssey Explained
(some great
Flash)
and of course you recognize
this line,
and now he's made the official 
International Year of the
Potato web site (in five languages!)
and here's
another adoptive-Roman friend, Catherine
who received an MBE from
this emissary
of the Queen of England for her superb work running
the
Keats-Shelley House,
and while we're on the subject of
things Italian
do your gift shopping for the choicest goodies
from John and Victoria's
La Raccolta
or an Italian silk scarf 
from my Italophillic pal Lisa P.
or take an eye-popping
tour of the secret gardens of Italy from my Italophillic pal Lisa F.,
and my pal 
Ken Jacobs knows
who killed JFK,
and what about my oddball friend Gail
the webmistress (eh?),
and here's
where I stay in Rome,
on a recent visit to Italy I discovered hilarious, spunky
Luciana Littizzetto,
(and if you really like spunky,
be hip to in-your-face Afropuff 
Aya de Leon),
worked for a time at the alas now-defunct
Colex Electronic Company Limited, 15th Floor,
Luk Hop Industrial Building,
8 Luk Hop Street, San Po Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong,
manufacturer of what was then (1983) the world's cheapest
Unix machine (and the price was low, too :-) dubbed "poxy box" by
James Hole
(it crashed when you typed
cat),
and here's Fritz Schaerli
,
the president of Adasoft AG
makers of zutrittskontrollsisteme in Switzerland
where I also enjoyed working long ago,
once
modeled the
"...sleek, European-style monitor arm" in the Inmac catalog
(the Sun workstation screen is turned to hide
the error messages),
listened to Frank Zappa
and Firesign Theatre
(this is actually my high school
(Notre Dame
International 
yet another Rome school, sigh) buddy Bill Zimmerman
imitating the Firesign Theater)
in college
(UCSC -- here's
graduation with roommate Nic Nelken who today is a vascular surgeon at
Kaiser),
have always been fascinated by electronic music starting with
Alvin Curran's in Rome in the 60's then
studied with Gordon Mumma
(who introduced me both musically
and personally to John Cage and others) at UCSC in the 70's and in 1977 at
Dartmouth
with one of the inventors of the
Synclavier --
Jon Appleton
(with Moog and Syntrophia hat,
with prototype Synclavier in
road cases in San Francisco for a performance at the
Exploratorium
)
and at Stanford with John Chowning
and in 1982 built my first studio
with my then-roommate and techno-wild-man
Michael Schippling,
played jazz in grad school),
mourn for adored drummer 
Bruce Felter
(with whom the pocket was so deep we
delighted in calling it a trench) who passed on 12/20/2007,
and the 7/7/7 loss of beloved friend and mentor
Joe
Podolsky,
the Nov. 2000 loss of
Larry Morehead
the real estate mogul (funny story: unbeknownst to
either of us at the time,
the first building I bought was the first he sold),
and another loss -- on 12/22/2002 my
JazzCamp
buddy
Robin Gilbert
passed away,
and that year we also lost pianist/artist
Kent Holloway 
,
and in early 2004 so too passed away my beloved ex-father-in-law
Lauri Hieta
(I was once married to a Finn;
here are 
photos
from a happy time),
and on 4/14/2004 we lost
Gosina Mandersloot,
and shortly thereafter we lost
Nameers 
,
and in 2005 was the passing of
Joe Bithell with whose
Silicon Gulch Jazz Band
I used to enjoy gigging,
and on 12/23/2005 we lost the extraordinary trumpet player and
lifelong friend 
Robin
Hodes, in 2007 we lost drummer and beloved friend
Ben Randall,
and here is 
the grave of John Piccoli (in the
Cimitero
Acattolico, managed in part by Heather 
and where I myself intend to be buried)
who died in 1955 at age 16 on his brand-new
motorbike given to him that very day by his doting father Nemo the sculptor,
so I have been
thinking about death
lately, hang onto old
friends, went to
Thailand in 2006
to see the
longneck ladies (and my friend
Jason who wrote a succinct statement of his
political values)
-- used to go every year to
Carnaval
in Salvador (capital city of the Brazilian state of Bahia,
the 
musical soul of that most musical country),
adore the singing of
Gal Costa 
Brazil's top star (terrible politics, 
terrible
hair, but fabulous pipes, phrasing, time, arrangements, production,
repertory, and sidemen -- isn't that what counts?
...oh yes, another deity in my pantheon is 
Ray Brown -- it's said that when he was
married to
Ella Fitzgerald and they had a fight she threw his bass
into the pool -- but that's not why I worship him),
for three years (2000-2003) made jazz acoustic bass my primary career
often as
a sideman for
singers
(here's my
musical resume
and my
gig calendar
),
made some
MP3 sound clips
(in my own little studio) of people I worked with such as
Mal Sharpe's
Big Money in Dixieland, especially enjoyed playing with
Cathy Withacee Felter and My Trio,
have compiled what, despite its relentless and interminable
loquacity (and brutality toward
violists -- I dated one once; I should know)
is probably not the definitive collection of
musician jokes, in 2004 moved on to my third career (career not job
-- important distinction),
have gotten interested in 
wireless networks
with 
,
am, with my family, active in our local community
(here's us
scrubbing the sidewalks in a picture in
our
neighborhood paper),
former volunteer-webmaster for
Children's Day School that Cara used to attend,
visited
my New York family in Spring, 2002,
again in July of 2004,
and again in 
December of 2005,
and the glorious Fourth in Alameda,
and I must warn you that
terrible
things happen when you turn 50,
in 2004 and 
2007 strolled the
Bay-to-Breakers,
in 2007 threw a 
party for Susan,
occasionally cook
couscous,
spaghetti al tonno al modo di Leo,
pasta bianca al forno al modo di
Marilena,
and
Singapore noodles,
and am reminded by
the World Trade Center attack to attend to
disaster preparedness
(my ham callsign is KG6OIE)
and, accordingly, have been
programming my radios
-- if you live in the SF Bay Area, you may find useful my
collection of local public agencies
frequencies and
police codes
(in a crisis, know what's going on!) and
Cara and I took the
Neighborhood Emergency Response Team training,
and I'm appalled (humorous political images)
at how easily
the
superstitious
and simple-minded (hey dittohead morons, can't
think beyond sound bites?
we'll give you sound bites!)
citizens of the USA are distracted
(it's
still
the
economy, stupid!
...and
the environment!
...and social justice!) by the
warmongers
and their
weapons of mass distraction...
-- hey!
kill your TV!
--
Osama's strategy of bankrupting us
with an endless war
(worked well on the Soviets in Afghanistan)
is working!
-- have we forgotten
Vietnam?
I still have
my draft card
(nope, didn't burn it!) --
Fuehrer Bush
(what an abysmal track record)
and his corrupt oligarchy
cheated
their way into public office,
have no compunctions about torture (Garrison Keillor
waxed eloquent), muzzling the press, or subverting elections -- these monsters are capable of
martial law, prison camps, and a dictatorial police state
-- see 
Naomi Wolf's
Fascist
America, in 10 easy steps
(ok, enough ranting...
ahh, to protest in style like the Italians!),
and here we are
demonstrating
against Bush,
am
converting
my house to renewable energy
(solar and wind),
love to visit
our friend Helmut's ranch,
in 2004 
Arky is into
basketball and in 2006
he is into soccer
and in 2003 he joined me
on a 
mind-boggling
(and strenuous) sea-kayaking trip in Baja,
recently swapped apartments with
Eric
Richmond,
my buddy from third grade (his is in London),
while in London saw my forever pal
Amedeo 
who started the company Raceco that makes high-tech motorcycles,
and also from third grade there's
Johnny Bruckman (funny... he doesn't look like a third grader... :-)
whose Dad changed my life by showing us kids on Johnny's birthday
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (in his company's
private screening room, no less!)
and I became the tough, silent loner (hah!),
love to visit 
Rick Ackerly's ranch in Mendocino County's Anderson Valley
(the new Napa Valley),
and traveling farther afield are Jeff Johnson and
Karen Ande and her superb,
poignant
photos
of orphans in AIDS-torn Kenya,
occasionally do 
silly little computer art
thingies,
in 2007 I finally went to 
Burning Man
(as part of the Burning Band)
and vow to someday show it to my kids (who will be astounded... as was I...),
avoid superstition (everyone's got an opinion about food and diet;
few are scientific... especially all this
blather
about "carbs")
and wishful thinking
(Atkins is popular because people like being told to eat
steak and butter)
but research and science reveal that
beans are indeed the
(cholesterol-lowering, insulin-balancing, life-prolonging) musical
fruit -- just ask the
Pritikin
program for health and longevity,
fret also about 
the longevity of my data CDs,
and...
you noticed this entire page is a single sentence?
Updated Wednesday, 10-Dec-2008 10:08:06 CST
IBM 360,
got a master's degree in
a
tricycle and later an
and custom-built Sun Frost
appliances 
the cover of the Oct. 2004 SF Apartment magazine
and was the set for one episode of a short-lived TV series named
whose
economy is the world's sixth-largest
(Italy's is seventh; China's is eighth),
have become interested in 
S.S. Amerika,
have an apocalyptic vision of
inevitable and catastrophic
environmental collapse
business
cards along the way, rely utterly on an antique
but marvelous piece of engineering --
DOS!), I still
write
HTML
,
just discovered that pretty much everything I know
parasailing in Mexico) and when I swim laps
I listen to music on a
of the Queen of England for her superb work running
the
(the Sun workstation screen is turned to hide
the error messages),
listened to Frank Zappa
passed away,
and that year we also lost pianist/artist
Kent Holloway 
,
and in early 2004 so too passed away my beloved ex-father-in-law
Lauri Hieta
(I was once married to a Finn;
here are 
Cathy Withacee Felter and My Trio,
have compiled what, despite its relentless and interminable
loquacity (and brutality toward
2007 strolled the
Vietnam?
I still have
my draft card
their way into public office,
have no compunctions about torture (Garrison Keillor
martial law, prison camps, and a dictatorial police state
-- see