I am currently employed at the Motorola Somerset Design Center in Austin, TX. I work on advanced methologies for verification of computer chips prior to sending them out for fabrication. Other areas of work include parallel algorithms, parallel I/O, and I/O complexity of databases. I have also written an article about using the World Wide Web to teach Welsh that was published in the DAGS '95 conference.
| 1978 1982 1986 1989 1994 | Tulane University MIT Harvard University Brown University Brown University | B.S. (Chemistry and Physics), B.S. (Mathematics) S.M. (Physical Chemistry) S.M. (Computer Science) S.M. (Computer Science) Ph.D. (Computer Science) |
My interest in Welsh really began in 1984 when my wife and I took a trip to England, Scotland, and Wales. While we were in England and before we hit Wales, I saw a book in a bookstore entitled Teach Yourself Living Welsh by T.J. Rhys Jones and decided to learn some of the language. We did not have much success in S. Wales, since such a small percentage of the people in Cardiff speak Welsh, but we stayed on a farm in N. Wales with people who used Welsh as their first language. We bought some additional books while we were there.
Two years later, we returned to Wales to go to the National Royal Eisteddfod. At that point, I figured that since I had read the books I had bought previously, that I would be pretty fluent in Welsh. It turned out the books I had bought were the equivalent of children's books, and I was amazingly unprepared. Nevertheless, I bought a new set of books and returned with a new determination to learn the language. Somewhere along the line, I also bought a Welsh Bible and used it for my daily devotionals until I had read it in its entirety. So my knowledge of Welsh comes primarily from books as a self-taught learner. The pronunciation came from Welsh folk music tapes that my wife and I had bought on our various trips to Wales.
Several years ago, I attended Cymdeithas Madog's annual week-long intensive Welsh course. At that point, I was surprised (and pleased) to discover that I could speak the language fluently, with my major problem being the need to acquire additional vocabulary. On my most recent trip to Wales, during a chat with a fellow in a pub, he mentioned that he was able to understand every word that I said, so my pronunciation must be at least adequate, if probably accented. I do have difficulty understanding some of the dialects of Welsh, but this difficulty does not worry me terribly, since native speakers of the various dialects have a hard time understanding each other.
The Welsh course began when people on the WELSH-L mailing list started clamoring for a way to be introduced to learning Welsh. At that time, Roger Vanderveen started writing a course. Being inspired by his example, I started writing exercises for his course. It then occurred to me that it would be kind of neat to the course in Structure Enhanced Text (setext) so that it could be distributed to the list in formatted ASCII, but also have all the information necessary for making a nice Web version. Eventually, I took the course over completely, and at this point Roger's major contribution is Chapter 1 (pronunciation). Briony Williams helped substantially by creating the sound files that go with Chapter 1 for teaching the pronunciation (I even refined my own pronunciation as a result of hearing them).
I have been living in Austin, TX since 1996 with my wife Misty, our two children, Timothy and Anna, and my mother, Shirley. We are involved in the ministry of a Great Commission Fellowship church. I am training for my black belt in American karate with the Austin Society of Karate. Misty is also a leader of a local Awana club and works part-time as a researcher for the Telcordia.