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But first I was at...

Galesburg High School, 1968
Knox College (B.A. Physics), 1972
Colorado State University (M.S. Atmospheric Science - convective storms), 1976.
Also five years' part time work in the Galesburg and Knox libraries, and some occasional part time work assisting a couple of professors with teaching astronomy and meteorology to high school kids and underclassmen.

By the way, Congress recently designated Galesburg to be the home of the National Railroad Hall of Fame and Museum. It still needs funding. Knox C. (located in Galesburg) is the last remaining site of the Lincoln- Douglas debates.

And then suddenly, it now seems...

As a kid I dreamed of doing atmospheric research and/or forecasting. However, after arriving at NCAR, I settled into programming and atmospheric data archiving. I've been doing this for 36 years, over 33 here at NCAR. There was a 25 year celebration, for me and a few others, along the way.

I collect, maintain and distribute the data for some of our most popular CISL/DSS datasets.

The scientists I help are mostly at U.S. universities. I also provide support to U.S. government and commercial interests, and limited support around the world, from Argentina to Viet Nam; notably China, Japan, Europe and Brazil. However, I only speak English, FORTRAN, C-shell UNIX, and a little HTML. Be alert for malapropisms, which of course diffuse the light through bad prisms.

There have been astounding changes in the technology I have used to meet the challenges during my career. These can be summed as moving from slide rules, punch cards, half-inch tapes and hand- and type-written documentation to hand calculators, text editors and Web/FTP downloads. And of course advancement in computers and atmospheric models. The transitions are challenging.

A big lesson in my career has been the recognition that there are no standard data formats. Some computer geeks insist on claiming otherwise. What I've seen are competing formats, each based on the next great thing, each tailored to support new applications and each become obsolete after awhile. So those trained on the latest and greatest, and little else, haven't enough experience to appreciate what has been going on, and what it means for the future.

Our group won the 1980 NCAR Technical Achievement Award "for preparing a complete and accessible meteorological data set." Sometime in the 1990s we were nominated for a similar award for our contributions to the NCAR/NCEP Reanalysis Project. It supported a significant step by a large number of scientists to improve the NCEP atmospheric models, and provide a consistent reanalysis of historical meteorological conditions.

The Reanalysis Project enabled making a long series of forecasts which can be scientifically compared to subsequent day's analyses. This helps guide enhancements to ongoing forecasts. It also helps eliminate some noise in climate studies, among other things. The noise arises, over the years, from model changes and shortcomings, and also data resources, notably instrument changes. Major operational forecast centers in Europe and Japan are engaged in similar projects. Also, reanalyses are themselves being repeated as things are improved. There is a productive kind of feedback loop here.

Reanalyses started out as a dream, waiting for computer horsepower and data storage media capacity and transfers to catch up. Today the operational forecast centers are also making ensemble forecasts, where the forecast products of differing models, and error analyses are used to make more reliable likelihood estimates. There is discussion about adding more of these estimates to what the public receives. Returning to completing my place in all this ...

I designed, and for over 25 years, maintained the DSS internal database, which tracked our datasets, master file lists and data orders. Initializing this thing involved transcribing information from handwritten notes. This took a year and a half. Later I and three others received an NCAR/CISL award in 2001 "For the Total Upgrade and Enhancements to the Research Data Web Interface", which depended on my IDB. Beginning in 2006, other staff have been migrating the contents of its flat file system to a true database, designed and maintained by our newer staff.

Married Nancy Schroeder 1985 August. She provides visiting CNA and PCP services for people with various disabilities. We give money, time, and other things to several charities. Among them:

Association of Retarded Citizens of Denver
National Multiple Sclerosis Society
National Stroke Association
Valley Heights Christian Church, of the Disciples of Christ

The latter is a relatively liberal denomination. I served as Financial Secretary for four years. This church suffered from at least three political splits, and closed 2008 November. Never thought I would be this close to a church collapse.

I enjoy sports, movies, music and astronomy. I have been an avid league bowler for over 40 years, including several scratch leagues and coaching kids for a little while. Professor Wayne Green (Knox C.) suggested that I do my senior paper on the physics of bowling. I later studied the concepts, and used them to some advantage. I've competed with and against a few of Denver's best, including some PBA members, such as Les Schissler and Mike Dias, and I've done a few local and national tournaments. But I've lost the edge in recent years - problems with my back, a rotator cuff, an Achilles tendon, blah, blah, blah. Extend yourself while you can.

I like golf, but my play has mostly been a hacking routine which spoils otherwise pleasant walks on nice grass. One of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winners, Kevin Trenberth, a member of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) once played on my team in the NCAR golf league several years ago. While in college, I played a round of golf with Roger Warren, a GHS '68 friend, who served as president of the PGA from 2005 - 2006. OK, enough name dropping.

Nancy and I have also enjoyed hiking and tent camping - no Winnebagos for us. It's quiet solitude in the mountains, much needed relief from the madness of urban life and the occasional summer heat spells.

I collect music and videos.

Almost (and how could I) forgot to say Go Rockies, Cubs, Bears and Broncos! I wish everyone gets to experience something like the fever of the 2007 Rockies Run to the World Series. It was fantastic sharing it with fans at the ballpark. What a rush. It totally blew away the Rockies' 1995 Wild Card experience, or anything the Cubs have done in my lifetime.

I intend to add a few pictures to this page, when I get a round tuit. I keep getting square tuits, which don't work very well.

Here is a small subset of my database of "one liners" and other thoughts. Some collected from others (I should have kept more credits), some are my twists on well known sayings, and some I wrote myself. The last are marked with a *.

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"12 Monkeys" - Every time you see a movie it seems different. But it didn't change, you changed.

"12 Monkeys" - I don't really come from outer space ... It's a condition of mental divergence. I find myself on the planet Ogo, part of an intellectual elite, preparing to subjugate the barbarian hordes on Pluto. But even though this is a totally convincing reality for me, in every way, nevertheless, Ogo is actually a construct of my psyche. I am mentally divergent in that I am escaping certain unnamed realities that plague my life here. When I stop going there I will be well. Are you also divergent, friend?

A day without laughter is a wasted day!

* According to digerati, who can be embrangling, if you have borborygmus, then prepare to defenestrate, so as not to appear too otiose. (I forget where I found these unusual words, but I had this weird urge to put them all in one sentence.)

Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.

Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.

* Can you make your data sing?

* Celebrating 40 years of tape parity errors, disk head crashes, fried chips, security breaks, power failures, lost files, viruses and spyware.

Coldplay - "Look at the stars, look how they shine for you, for all the things that you do"

Computers come in two varieties: the prototype and the obsolete.

Darwin was a respected member of the Anglican Church. He is buried at Westminster. At the service, all the church elders praised his work.

* Do you suppose thoughts like these are heard on other planets? Will they respond with an army of psychiatrists?

* Does your car need a tuneup? Drive it in to Lord of the Pings for the best tuneup in Middle Earth. We service drag-ins too.

Earl Weaver - "In baseball you can't kill the clock. You've got to give the other team a chance. That's why this is the greatest game."

Einstein - "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

* Ever feel like you're just a microcosmic bag of organic chemicals having a nanoscopic moment of self-awareness?

"Ferris Bueller's Day Off" - the principal's scene during the final credits.

Frisbatarianism: the belief that, when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck there.

"Ghostbusters" - "Gozer the Traveler will come in one of the three chosen forms. During the rectification of the Voldranee, the Traveler came as a large moving Torg. Then during the third reconciliation of the lots of the Meketric supplicants, they chose a new form for him, that of a giant Slorg. Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what is was to be roasted in the depths of the Slorr that day, I can tell you."

Have a weird day.

"The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy" - Attention people of Earth. I regret to inform you that, in order to make way for a new hyperspace express route, your planet has been scheduled for demolition. Have a nice day.

"The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy" - "The answer to the ultimate question is ... 42."

"The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy" - the yarn scene.

How is it one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?

* I don't know, I think I'll wait until Gillette comes out with a 17 blade razor.

I laughed my head off. Then I grew another one and laughed it off.

* In a lifetime, say 80 years, at 16 hours per day, if we think at the rate of 4 words per second, that adds up to about 6.7 billion words. At 8 characters (8 bytes) per word, thats about 54 billion characters (54GB). A compact disk can hold about 600MB (600 million characters), meaning that a recording of a lifetime of thought would fill about 90 CDs. It is not clear what storage requirements would be involved with the matter of recording all the sensory information.

Legions of lisping leprechauns are lallygagging in your lilies.

*Lets return nature to its original state - that moment 1/INFINITY second after the Big Bang.

Life is not about how fast you run, or how high you climb, but how well you bounce.

On April 27, 2005, this story came from Berlin - "More than 1,000 toads have puffed up and exploded in a Hamburg pond in recent weeks, and scientists still have no explanation for what's causing the combustion..."

* Politically correct impaired

Problem: if you could collect 1 million sneezes all at the same time and rush them through a tunnel about 6 feet in diameter, how many people could you knock down at the other end of the tunnel? I don't have the answer, I was just hoping somebody else did.

* Read and heed: Look out your window. If the sun is shining and the grass is green, then you are on the wrong side of the window. Take immediate remedial action. Head to the nearest exit and use it. Don't look back.

Red Smith - "Ninety feet between bases is perhaps as close as man has ever got to perfection."

Remember: Only by learning from the mistakes we've committed in the past can we truly improve the quality of the mistakes we will make in the future.

SatireWire.com - Cubists Launch Unnavigable Web Site

Science can't answer any of the really important questions.

* September 3 - 13, 1751 never happened.

"Sleeper" - the scenes around NCAR

"Saturday Night Live - The Land of Gorch" - That's gonna cost you! Four chickens, one swan and one duck.

"The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" - the gunfight in the cemetery

The following statement is true. The preceding statement is false. Try to make a computer process that.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt and a leaky tire.

The one who only takes the serious seriously and the light lightly, understands both poorly.

The second mouse gets the cheese.

* To serve man, turn to page 127 for the recipe. (Inspired by a Twilight Zone episode)

Try at all times to fold, spindle, staple and mutilate.

U2 - "Baby slow down. The end is not as fun as the start. Please stay a child somehere in your heart..."

"V for Vendetta" - "People should not be afraid of their government. The government should be afraid of the people."

* Vultures prefer carrion to carryout.

Water filtration removes large pollutants like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists.

* Whan can one do? A little more than zero.

What did people breathe before oxygen was discovered in the late 1700s?

When arriving at work early, you will go unnoticed. When you arrive at work late, you will meet the boss in your office.

When astronomers are measuring distance in space, do they add an extra light-day for every leap year?

When leaving work late, you will go unnoticed. When you leave work early, you will meet the boss in the parking lot.

When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.

* When you die, your brain will not know that its last thought was its last thought

Which should I use here, the gazillion-ultra-watt EHC-1 Alpha Hyperbolic Chamber Semantic Resonator or the high-energy lowest-common-denominator-inductive Supercolloquial Mundane Adjectival And Onomatopoeic Accentuator? (With thanks to "The Onion")

Wrath of Grapes

* You haven't really sneezed until you make dogs bark and children scream.

* Your F8 key is preprogrammed.