Copyright © 1995 - 2025
Copyright © 1995 - 2025, Richard Troy
For contact data Click Here.
So, this is my home page... I seldom get a chance to work on it,
so don't be surprised if it's a bit messy!
I am one of the lucky few who does something for a living that I enjoy: Earth & Computer Sciences (in various forms). And I have a chosen set of hobbies which also entertain and delight me to no end!
To give you some idea about who I am I offer the following with which I identify (in no particular order): Engineer, romantic poet, philosopher, writer, flyer, driver, sailor, musician, craftsman, ... a somewhat unique mix of perfectionist/realist/idealist/optimist/sentimentalist...
From here you can browse:
AT RIGHT: This is me, with one of my cars... in the Behring Auto Museum, Blackhawk California. I restored the car, a '58 Karmann Ghia, taking 8 years to do it - the results speak for themselves.
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, I have always somehow felt associated with JFK, perhaps because of the New Orleanian connection to his death. New Orleans was, and I suppose still is, a strange paradox of time and place, always perpetually 10 to 20 years behind the times, yet somehow far ahead. And it has certainly always been an interesting cultural mix. With Texas and Mississippi as neighbors, and the Muddy Mississippi flushing the industrial effluent from Northern Yankee Businesses through our borders, Louisiana seemed trapped in an ethereal whirlpool, a mix of Red Necks, Cajuns, and foreign visitors.
One bizarre morning, still a teenager, I awoke from this dream and found myself in quite another: The San Francisco Bay Area, in one of its many booms... I had been a Machine Language programmer for TANO in New Orleans, and wrote an entire real-time, multi-tasking operating system by myself while going to Tulane University, but now I got job offers from Apple, and Lockheed, among many others and was a complete neophyte in the world of Big Business. . . But I'm a quick study.
A few years there learning the ropes of bigger, corporate systems
and the corporate world writ large, and a transfer to Colorado
meant an introduction to WINTER! That's where my car
collection really took off! My days were filled with operating
system internals, and "application layer products", and the
inevitable crash dumps, while Karmann Ghias and Porsches consumed
all the rest of my time. But eventually, I decided I was tired of
being attacked because, apparently, my long hair AND beard
triggered ignorant fools into thinking I was gay - so I got a
first hand look at what it is to be Gay in rural America though
I'm thoroughly hetero - "cisgendered" as they say these days.
I ended up back in sunny CA with Ingres where I developed expertise in the Relational model - basically set theory - RDBMS internals... no big deal for a Systems programmer! After all, the Ingres Server is like a mini-operating system. . . a few good years, various symposia, consulting assignments, developing & delivering training (sometimes in Europe!) server internals, installation scripts, and lets not forget Database Replication! ... and a lot of bad management, and the next thing you knew, Ingres, as they say, was history.
A few independent Consulting gigs, and before I knew it, Mike
Stonebraker asked if I would help him by leading and
managing the "Big Sur" project at the University of
California, Berkeley. I asked why me and among his reasons was, he
said, I had the chops - first hand experience and knowledge - that
garnered respect from the much older faculty and researchers while
at the same time being about the same age as the "Doc and
Post-Doc" students who made up a lot of the manpower actually
doing the work, and thus I didn't intimidate them like the
professors and other (older than me) researchers did. And so I
ended up leading the 45 person team that implemented the results
of the "Sequoia 2000" project, thus, Big Sur was the first
properly funded, serious effort into studying this phenomena we
know as "Global Climate Change Driven By Global Warming."
We were successful and after a few years and I got grants of my
own. And, also during the original BigSur funding (which was
extended a few years), I was asked by NASA to commercialize my
research. They provided enough money for a 40 person team and the
result was The BigSur
System, officially developed by my company, Science
Tools Corp. (The BigSur System has grown into a fully
mature, incredibly capable enterprise-scale tool-set of
unparalleled scope. Its
specifications are available here.)
I have a lot of interests, and pursue a large number of them on an "occasional" basis. But there is no question about which is the most dominant. Because the dominant one will get so much air time, I'll mention here some of the less dominant ones: Aviation, Travel, Beer, Swimming, Music, Philosophy and Poetry... and there must be a few more things, but they escape me for the moment. There's a short bit on these below.
Aviation was my first passionate subject. I visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum when I was five and it really grabbed me. I became a pilot as soon as it was legal for me to do so, and bought my own plane before that even - a 1947 Cessna 140.
I got the travel bug when I was young too. Before I was a high school freshman I had already visited about half the principal cities of the U.S. and most of the States. I made my first trip to Europe at 14. Since then I've spent about 4.5 years so far in Europe but that came at the unfortunate neglect of the rest of the globe. Oh well, but that just means there are still more places I need to see!
I've become an accomplished chef with Cajun and New Orleanian
cuisines as my favorites. I'm partial to things meant to be drunk
just below room-temp - and I always have. I was one of the buyers
who helped change the beer market to "micro-brews" Regarding
music, I play the trumpet and am partial to Cajun, Zydeco, and
Rhythm and Blues - oh yes, and "Dinosaur Rock!"
There's no question that automobiles are my dominant hobby: I collect and personally restore '50s era Karmann Ghias, and Porsche 356s, and my collection includes a very low mileage '69 Porsche 911, a Rometsch, and a special kind of Karmann Ghia (also from the '50s) known as the Montage Suisse. And, I'm also into Vintage speed equipment for these same cars...
I am the Founder and President of the Karmann
Ghia Club of North America.
4200 Park Blvd. #151, Oakland, CA, 94601, USA.