Personal Details about Roedy Green

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Roedy Green taken 2008-05-24	Roedy Green is an independent computer consultant with 54 years experience available for speaking, consulting or contract programming work on socially significant projects involving Java, Abundance, Assembler or the Internet.

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Contact and Identification	Dash 30 Dash
Rates	The Backyardigans
Interests	Equipment
Salient facts	Preferences
Loves	Family
People I Would Like To Meet	Spelling
Formal Education	Links
Non-Military Use Only

Contact and Identification

Roedy’s identification details
	Internet email:	feedback for publication: I am swamped with mail. I am years behind in answering. please don’t take offense if I don’t respond immediately.
		support:
		personal mail:
	website:	http://mindprod.com
	address:	Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products Precise address withdrawn due to too many death threats. Victoria, BC Canada Latitude N+48° 25’ 00” Longitude W-123° 22’ 00”
	telephone:	(250) 361-9093 (please use email in preference to telephone)

born: 1948-02-04 shortly before midnight, age 70 years and 3 months.

I am a big guy 6’2½”, with a bellowing, alarming voice, born 1948-02-04, with hair like Doc in Back To The Future, only brown. I have a clumsy lurching gate caused by neuropathy and back trouble. I feel embarrassed about my appearance and so usually avoid appearing in public.

marital status: attached but not married.

name on birth certificate: Munroe Frederic Compton Green.

nickname: Roedy which rhymes with Cody, pronounced Rho-Dee accent on the first syllable. This is a nickname derived from Munroe, my school days name.

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nome de plume: Gaius. Gaius speaks for planet earth, through me as a channel and translator. Transcribing Gaius’s thoughts is much like playing charades. The name Gaius is rich with associations in the Pagan, Roman and Christian traditions.

Rates

I usually work on a fixed price for a contract. The price depends on how long I think it will take and how interesting I think the work will be, how useful I think the work will be to the planet and how busy I am. I am happiest to tackle small challenging problems, the parts of a project you can’t solve yourself. I ask for half the money up front and half on completion to your satisfaction. All bug fixes are included, no matter when they are discovered and get top priority. You can pay by PayPal to my email account, or by cheque. Sorry I no longer accept credit cards.

I also work on a hourly basis for consulting, brainstorming, coaching, trouble shooting etc. Again, there my rate is based on your ability to pay and how valuable the work is to the planet. I usually charge charities per hour, individuals per hour and businesses per hour.

Interests

Planetary consciousness — think globally, act locally. Optimize globally. Plants and animals have just as much right to the planet as humans. Man is the caretaker of earth, not its master. We must reduce the number of humans without resorting to war, pestilence or violence.

This includes in roughly descending order: Ending the Iraq war. Removing Republicans from power. Protecting the environment. Fair treatment of the third world. Relaxing the taboos that are holding our populations too high. Communication with cetacea and other animals including humans. Pranging (highly unexpected stunts that break people’s conditioned patterns or addictions. Ideally they make people temporarily question reality.). Writing essays. Frogs. Africa. Tropical reefs.

My whole life, starting in childhood has been mainly about various causes: in roughly the chronological order they came to my attention:

reducing pesticides
animal cruelty
nuclear disarmament
gay lib
eliminating dogmatic religions
ending war
protecting the environment, protecting forests, water pollution, air pollution, garbage recycling.
protecting whales and dolphins
ending hunger
universal health care
global warming
fair treatment of domestic animal
impeaching George Bush
homelessness

Right now, global warming and ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are at the top of my priority.

Salient facts

loves speaking to large audiences.
Uses humour to gently introduce revolutionary ideas. Talks in metaphors with hidden meaning. Actively implementing plans to reshape the world.
I prefer contract work in Java, Abundance or assembler. I’d also be interested in working with Smalltalk, but I don’t have experience with it yet.
donated his fully paid for house to charity in the spring of 1985 to help out with the Ethiopian famine.
started Gay Lib in western Canada back in 1969. This has lead to spirited battle ever since with the Kristians.
HIV+ (Human Immuno-deficiency Virus Positive (infected)) since summer of ’85 (the AIDS (Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome) rabbit died, but I’m still alive.)
Wrote an article in ’86 October Byte Magazine on Abundance. It is a computer language that can jaunt (run forward and backward in time). Its philosophy is radically different from the mainstream. You can download the public domain compiler.
Wrote the public domain BBL (Big Black Lady) (Big Black Lady) 32-bit Forth compiler. JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) told me they used it as a base for their compiler to control unmanned space craft.
Worked with John Lilly at the Human Dolphin Foundation. Wrote an electronic Etch-A-Sketch controlled by delphinic whistles. Took dolphins on their first tour of the human world using a video camera and underwater video monitor. Worked on project Janus. Present at the first experiment in 1979-11. Swimming with the dolphins was something else. This is not how I did it, but you could try any number of places to arrange a swim.
Wrote Optow — a program that designed most of the transmission lines in BC and Brazil. It was the first time I discovered the whole was more than the sum of its parts. It had a style and personality that I had no intention of programming in — it just emerged out of the low level detail.
Types with a Kinesis Classic keyboard in DSK.

The idea of Dvorak is the most common characters are in your home row and the least common in the bottom row. I could not touch type QWERTY without severe wrist pain. With DSK (Dvorak Standard Keyboard) I can type for hours a day at up to 100WPM (Words Per Minute) 8 CPS (Characters Per Second) without discomfort.
IBM (International Business Machines) told me that I was at one point the youngest computer programmer in the world. This was back in the days when having access to the white coat and locked computer rooms was like being a child astronaut.
wants to learn new languages including Esperanto, Chinese, Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, Arabic and an African language. I am most interested in grammar and how language determines what you can think.
Past president of Apples BC.
I was known across Canada for my monthly column in The Computer Paper in the early days of personal computers explaining the technology in layman’s terms.
CMP (Canadian Mind Products) used to manufacture custom computers and custom software. Some of the more interesting projects were reverse engineering the controls at Woodwards Department stores replacing an IBM Series/1 mini with an AT (Advanced Technology) to schedule the lights and fans, writing a program to match lost and found cats for the Humane Society, managing bond sales for the State of Israel, managing financial records for Talmud Torah School and tracking all the testing and licensing of all 120,000 liquor servers in BC. Mostly though we did donation tracking systems for charities. CMP now is more involved with the human biocomputer.
I used to co-chair the Q&A session each month at VPCUS (Vancouver Personal Computer User Society).
In 1985 I had a conversation with the head of Tata, the General Motors of India. He was Gandhi’s godson. we talked about Gandhi. We also talked about India’s future as a software giant. He later left me to explore his private museum of Gandhi memorabilia. Since then, Tata has become a software giant in its own right. I like to think my ebullient conversation about India’s future helped give him confidence to pursue that tack.
In 1995 I started the notes for the Java glossary. It has since grown to a useful resource to the entire planet to learn Java.
Starting in 2000, I started writing about American politics, the crooked election, 2001-09-11 and the Iraq war, attempting to derail the Nazification of America. If my work cuts the war short by even a day, I have not lived in vain.

Loves

Inspiring people to take a stand for planetary consciousness, giving massages, hearing about people’s human relationship problems, The Royal Canadian Air Farce, Bach, Wendy Carlos, African music, Caribbean music, clean air, clean water, consciousness workshops, new efficient, secure computer architectures and new computer languages that make life easy for both programmer and user.

I love watching Takahiko Kozuka and Jeffrey Buttle skate. I find most figure skating too campy.

People I Would Most Like To Meet I Have Not Met Yet

In roughly desired chronological order: Jerry Herman, Anthony Robbins, Woody Allen and friends, Patrick Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, Julie Andrews.

Formal Education

I started my first year at Malvern House, a British-style Christian boarding school in Victoria BC. That’s probably where I picked up my slight English accent and schizophrenic attitude toward religion. I attended elementary school in West Vancouver at Cedardale for grades 2 and 3 then later Westcott for grades 4 through 6. I attended Hillside secondary and later West Van High. I was always the first, second or third student in my class in all subjects except physical education. I started school a year early, then later went on an accelerated program, so I graduated from grade 12 two years early. I went to UBC (University of British Columbia) and studied honours chemistry and mathematics. I got a BSc in Math in 1968. I took all the courses for my Masters degree, but gradually lost interest in mathematics because it was so far removed from practical application and because I had an exploding interest in computers and gay lib. I never did write a thesis. I fantasize I will receive a posthumous honorary doctoral degree for some of my work such as Abundance, SCID (Source Code In Database), or quantum theory.

Dash 30 Dash

The -30- at the end of my posts is a newspaper convention meaning the end. If you have a listing, it confirms all was printed properly. In a modem transmission it confirms nothing was chopped off. I picked up the habit originally from newspaper editor friend of mine. I have heard many different explanations about how the convention got started:

30 was part of the old 19th century Phillips telegraph code for finished.
In longhand news stories, authors used X to indicate the end of a sentence, XX for a paragraph end and XXX for story end. XXX is the Roman numeral for 30.
The maximum length of slugs that a typesetting machine could cast was 30 ems, so 30 meant the end of a line at story end, to separate it from next story.
According to one story, the convention originally started back in the 1920s or 30s as a solidarity signal requesting a raise to $30.
Supposedly, the first telegraph (in the Civil War) to a press association, was 30 words and the sender ended it with that number, the word goodnight and his name and the 30 stuck.
The maximum number of messages each member of the Associated Press could send was 30 and this marked a quota.
Some claim a reporter named Thirtee sent a story with his name and the operator changed it to a number.

The Backyardigans

Oddly one of my favourite TV Shows is targeted at pre-schoolers. I still have a television, but I canceled HDTV (High Definition Television) cable service, disgusted with the overall quality of programming. It is called The Backyardigans. It is about five cartoon animals, Tyrone a laid-back moose, Austin a shy kangaroo, Pablo an excitable penguin, Uniqua a feminist pink spotted animal, and Tasha a slightly bossy yellow hippopotamus. They have adventures of imagination in their common backyard. Watching this show puts a huge smile on my face and a generates a gentle euphoria. Part of what pleases is that I thoroughly approve of this show to indoctrinate the young. Its characters are curious, kind, considerate, positive and supportive — excellent rôle models. Each episode highlights a different musical genre with amusing original singable songs, a song parody and some simple dances. The 3D animation is smooth and at times super real, e.g. moving water, or tiny horses, with plenty of loving detail. The actors who do the voices are reasonably accomplished child singers. This show does not patronise kids with silly, pretending-to-be-stupid, shrill adults masquerading as children.

Preferences

colours: yellow, orange, lime green.
music: classical, especially Bach’s keyboard concerto #3 in D, the Adagio.
flatware: Oneida Paul Revere pattern.
dinnerware: Denby Energy pattern in dark brown and light green, unfortunately now discontinued.
clothes: Tilley Endurables: durable, plain, solid colours.
Keyboard: Kinesis DSK Classic QD.
food: stir fry, low fat, low salt, low sugar, pretty well anything but sushi.
fruits: mangoes, oranges, tangelos, pears
cold drink: all juices, non-alcoholic.
hot drink: black coffee, light roast, fair trade.
comedy: Dana Carvey, Jack Lemmon, Woody Allen, John Morgan.

Family and Friends

I don’t talk much about my family and friends because of the death threats against them. I don’t want to make it easy for nutcases angry at me to hassle them. I am the eldest of five children. I have three younger sisters and a younger brother. I have relatives across Canada, in the USA and in New Zealand. My nephew is a local TV star. They are a very supportive bunch. Both my parents and all my grandparents are dead. Dad was in charge of all electric power generation in the province for many years. My Mom founded North America’s first food bank called the Free Food Stall. My dad’s father was the Surveyor General. If you got back far enough, there was a female ancestor with a major rôle in the French revolution, so I came by my rabble rousing honestly. My nephew is actor Torrance Coombs, (or Tory as I call him), who starred as Juniper/John Doe in JPod and as Thomas Culpeper in The Tutors, a British historical drama. He is in Ireland filming five episodes in 2009-06 through 2009-08.

It is not important that you agree, but that you think the issues on this website through for yourself. I’m often wrong and I’m eager to hear the correct answers.

Spelling

I am Canadian, so I naturally use ou spellings like honour. People still mistake me as American, so I have affected some ise rather than ize British spellings as well to emphasise that I am not American.

Backyardigans
My heroes
peeves

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