Perri Nelson's Website 

About Me

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Published Sat, June 9 2007 10:45 AM

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Hello,

Well, as you can probably guess, my name is Perri Nelson. I was born on September 17, 1959 at Elmendorf A.F.B. near Anchorage, Alaska. My father was an Airman in the U.S.A.F. and so for most of my childhood we moved from place to place as the Air Force saw the need to station my dad in different places.

From the time I was three years old, until I had finished first grade, my family lived in Turkey. I have patchy memories from that time, but a few things stand out. One is a trip to Atatürk's mausoleum. Another is a trip to King Midas' tomb (yes, there really was a King Midas, but I doubt that his touch turned things to gold). Another was a trip to see the Roman Baths, and yet another was a visit to Cappadocea, where my family had the privilege of being the first Americans to get to see one of the (at that time) newly discovered underground cities where the early Christians lived to escape persecution.

On our return to the U.S. we lived in Virginia for a while before moving back to Alaska. After a brief time in Alaska we returned to Virginia. While we lived in Virginia, our family travelled up and down the East Coast, visiting historic sites and learning about American history.

In the early 1970s we moved to Florida, where I finished school. I went to Eau Gallie High School, and graduated in 1977.

I then took a brief stint at Michigan State University, where my own foolishness and the party atmosphere colluded to teach me a great life lesson. After a semester of dismal grades brought about by failing to attend classes and utter dissolution, I left Michigan State to return to Florida.

Back in Florida, I attended Brevard Community College and received my Associates Degree. I then took night courses at Rollins College's Patrick Air Force Base branch while working at Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburgers. In 1982 I received my Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics/Science, and started a career search.

At first the career search didn't go so well. I had a mathematics degree but didn't want to work with computers or be an engineer. The first place I applied had an advertisement in the newspaper looking for data analysts no experience required. They were looking for fresh college graduates, so I applied. I didn't get the job. I was told they had no openings for people with my lack of experience.

My mother was a librarian. One of the women that worked for her happened to be the wife of one of the directors at a local aerospace and electronics company named Harris Corporation. Anyway, through that happy circumstance I was told that if I put in an application he would see to it that it was considered. I did, and almost immediately was interviewed. I was turned down again.

Upon finding that out, the director asked me to meet with him. We met and he explained to me why I had been turned down. He suggested that next time I go to an inverview I should wear a suit, and that I should know what I wanted. He wondered why I hadn't applied for an engineering job.

I told him that I wasn't interested in being an engineer, and that I wanted to do just about anything else. Within a week I had another interview, with the same people that interviewed me the first time, and with another group. Both offered me a position, and I took the one with the group that had turned me down originally.

Within a couple of months, the company lost the contract for the job that they had hired me for, so they transferred me to the "proposal pricing" department. There I involuntarily had to learn how to use computers, how to run batch jobs, and eventually took a liking to them. Soon I learned how to write programs and eventually wrote a complete proposal pricing system to replace the one that the company was using.

In the process, I managed to not make too many friends in the I.T. department. They apparently didn't like the idea of some user competing with them. Eventually some side-by-side tests were done and my system won out.

In October of 1989 I went to Washington for a vacation and to visit my cousins. I almost immediately fell in love with the region's geography, particularly the mountains. I also made arrangements to come back and write a software system for my cousin's business.

I quit my job at Harris, and spent the next several months doing nothing but software documentation. I moved to Renton and started working with my cousin. After a short while I met John Itofe, who, together with his wife Patty, introduced me to my future wife Betty.

Betty and I were married on September 14th of 1991. Not too long after that I quit working with my cousin and started working as a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft.

On January 18 of 1994 my son Lucas was born. Shortly after that we moved to Covington, where we still live today.

I bought my first Corvette using cash I obtained through the exercise of some of my Microsoft stock options. About six months later I bought another one. The second purchase was an impulse decision, and a mistake. It was while I was trying to decide what to do with it that my wife suggested that we take it racing. I talked to John and we made arrangements to re-build the car as a drag racecar.

After nearly a year of work (mostly weekends) and dumping a ton of money into the project the car was finally ready to race in October of 1999. We took it to the track for one of the last races of the season. The car's first run was a dismal performance, finishing the quarter mile in well over 16 seconds. After all of that work it was actually slower than my unmodified 1977 corvette.

A little tune-up in the pits and the car's time improved to the mid 14 second range. The next season the car ran 14s for a while then it ran 13s. Somewhere along the way the transmission broke. We had it rebuilt and the car ran fine for a while. Then we broke the transmission again. I was devastated. It was a while before I had it rebuilt, this time by the folks at Meridian Transmission. They did a wonderful job and the transmission has been just about bulletproof ever since.

At about the same time, I was having problems fighting off a depression. It wasn't long before things got so bad that I eventually had to quit working at Microsoft because I couldn't get along with my supervisor anymore. I quit and decided that I would take a few months off before starting another job.

Not working for a living is boring. So I spent the time that I had writing software for myself. I had a copy of Charles Petzold's book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. In the book, he describes how computers work at the most basic level, the level of switches and logic gates. He describes how a computer could be built using nothing but relays, wire, and a power source. He also says that it would be insane to try to actually do this, because the cost would be prohibitive.

Naturally, I took that as a challenge. I spent the next two months doing it. Not with real hardware mind you. Just building 64 kilobytes of memory using the techniques described in the book would require an investment of over $15,000,000.00. No way could I afford that. But I could write a simulation, and so I did.

The first version of the simulation was clunky, took five minutes to initialize and ran horribly slowly. The second version wasn't much better, but it actually worked, at least as far as I took it. At about that time though I started looking for a real job, since I knew I couldn't afford to stay unemployed forever.

Sometime later, after having worked at a couple of other jobs I spent some more time working on the hardware simulation while I was on vacation. This time I revamped the entire thing as a modified finite state automaton. It initializes much faster, and runs much quicker as well. There are some timing issues with it in this form though, so it's a bit of a step backward in functionality, since it's no longer programmable. I'll probably come back to it for a fourth iteration, this time making it a true FSA and spending some time working on the timing issues. I eventually plan to hook up simulated peripherals to it and see if I can't make it a simulation of an early hobby computer with a monitor and keyboard.

Anyway, when I started looking for a real job I sent out resumes and cover letters to the listings I found in the newspapers. Almost as soon as I sent out my resume I got back responses. Soon I was working for a company called Greenwich Technology Partners (I'd list a link but their website no longer exists, going there takes you to a page of links to porn sites). I was hired to work on a Sharepoint conversion for a major bank. Unfortunately the bank put the project on hold the day after I was hired, and within three months I was laid off.

Not to worry. Within two weeks I was working for a company called Venturi Technology Partners, which was later bought up by COMSYS. I had worked for Venturi in the past, back when the company was named Business Enterprise Systems and Technology or B.E.S.T. Consulting. That made it relatively easy to get my foot in the door. Anyway, my first gig with them was at a company called Catalysis.

I worked there for about nine months, and was hired as a full time Senior Web Application Developer. I still work there today, and am mainly responsible for software architecture and systems design.

This website is a sample of my work. I wrote the blogging platform, the various modules used, (with the exception of the XMLRPC base implementation and the Diffie-Helmann key exchange code that's going into the OpenID implementation), the news-feed reader and the weather pages. I blog in my spare time, when I'm not busy with my family, watching racing, or at work.