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:

I was born in Seattle, Washington and grew up in North East, Pennsylvania and Harborcreek, Pennsylvania. I attended the Erie Day School from 3rd through 6th grade, and Harborcreek Junior/Senior High School, graduating in 1985. My academic work in high school included Chemistry, Physics, and English. From a very young age I was interested in computer programming, began learning to program my first computer, the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1, around 1977. In high school I wrote for an "APA" -- an amateur, photocopied science-fiction fanzine called "Tapadance."

I attended the College of Wooster from 1985 to 1989, graduating with a B. A. in English. I was awarded honors 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.

While in college I worked with the campus radio station WCWS, getting my FCC license and deejaying New Age music as well as more typical college radio. I served as Production Manager. I also held several jobs, tutoring, grading, working in the computer center as a consultant, and working as a peer tutor with Reading and Writing Center.

I taught myself programming in C and learned the rudiments of programming for the Macintosh, writing a couple of articles for Washington Apple Pi magazine. 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, "Connections," sixteen years later.

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. I was then 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.

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 to take a job with Pharos Technologies as a Newton developer, working primarily as a tester on the Monsanto Infielder Crop Records system. 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. During this period I also wrote a short run of articles on Newton programming which appeared in specialized programming magazines.

I was 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 web development, I worked on several prototype and demonstration probjects, including a CD-ROM database product which indexed two gigabytes of data in compressed form; I wrote the C++ search engine for the Windows platform.

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 dveloper and worked on software to support research projects, including a Newton program to administer sruveys. 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.

In 1999 I left 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. 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 were 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. I joined with some friends and co-workers in putting on a series of raves 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.

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 drivers for both MacOS 9 and MacOS X; I also introduced the use of makefiles for the DSP code build process and CVS for revision control.

On October 20th, 2001 Grace and I were married, and I became a parent, since she had a son, Isaac, age 5 (now 11).

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 played Chapman Stick on some songs.

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++.

On October 29, 2004, Grace and I had a baby girl, Veronica Ruth Potts.

When the Delphi documentation project ended, I was laid off, but then re-hired for a testing project with Visteon, where I worked on a Sirius satellite radio 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 commute any longer.

In the fall of 2005 I began working for Lectronix, Inc. where I work today as a senior software engineer.

Grace, Isaac and I are anticipating the birth of another child in early October.

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