About Me

My name is Doug Weathers. I’m married to Anna Paradox.

I’m a computer nerd. Also a science, space, and electric car nerd. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy. Favorite authors include (in no particular order) Larry Niven, Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, James Alan Gardner, Jack Vance, CJ Cherryh, Robert Heinlein (duh), John Barnes, Neal Stephenson.

At the moment I’m working on completing an electric car, fleshing out this website, earning an aerospace engineering degree, and looking for a job in the Southwest so as to be closer to the emerging private space industry.

Brief History
My memory is notoriously unreliable, so take the following with a grain of salt.

  • 1963 Born in Eugene, Oregon, while parents were attending the University of Oregon.
  • 1965 My father, Morris Weathers, joins the Air Force after graduating from U of O.
  • 1968 Moved to England (small base called High Wycombe Air Force Station, now turned into a high school). Clear memory of watching first moon landing on TV. First memories of Lego, the toy that made me the man I am today.
  • 1971 Moved to Croughton AFB. Fond memories of the computer room where Dad used to work on the big Univac mainframes for the 2130th Comm Squadron. Picked up my fascination with computers here.
  • 1976 Moved to Gunter Air Force Station in Montgomery, Alabama. Talk about a foreign country. Attended Houston Hills Junior High School, where I was amazed to discover books in the library that optimistically predicted we might land on the moon by 1975.
  • 1979 Moved to Brussels, Belgium. Attended Brussels American High School. Rediscovered computers on the Interdata 7/16 and Apple II. Learned to program in BASIC and found that computers were what I was born to do.
  • 1980 Lego Technica (later renamed Technic) introduced. I had never really given it up, but Lego Technic started my Lego renaissance.
  • 1981 Graduated high school, went to University of Oregon to get a computer science degree. Terrible grades. College didn’t agree with me. Bought an Atari 800 and became a pretty good BASIC hacker.
  • 1984 Dropped out, went to live with parents in San Bernardino, CA. Went to work in ComputerLand Store #38. Signed a non-disclosure agreement and learned about the Macintosh. Wow! What a machine. Epiphany. Sold the Atari and bought a Mac 128K right away.
  • 1986 Went back to U of O to make another stab at it. Went to work for Computer Solutions in Eugene. Began an upgrade spiral that ended us up with a Mac SE/30.
  • 1987 Met Anna, dropped out, and married her before someone else did. Perhaps I’ll finish the degree some day.
  • 1989 Computer Solutions closes.
  • 1990 Moved to Portland and began working for Alpha Computers. Learned Novell NetWare and networking.
  • 1991 Got tired of being mistreated and went to work for Metro. Much better.
  • 1994 Bought a house. I start to notice the Internet and the World Wide Web. Pumpkin comes to live with us, and a good thing too - the house had mice. Now we have a Quadra 605.
  • 1995 Anna undergoes surgery to remove basketball-sized ovaries. Comes out of it just fine, but not an experience we are eager to repeat.
  • 1997 I discover I have Type II diabetes. Fortunately I can control it by following the Zone Diet. Pike comes to live with us. We own a PowerBase 200 Mac clone.
  • 1998 Sold the car. It feels great! It’s amazing how much stress owning a car causes you. Built this web site.
  • 1999 David helped me reroof the garage. Upgraded to an iMac - the lime flavor.
  • 2000 Management upheaval at Metro leads to me taking a job at St. Charles Medical Center in Bend. Great job! We now need to own a car, though, so we buy a Subaru hatchback. It doesn’t suck.
  • 2003 I buy a 1971 VW Karmann Ghia and begin converting it to electric drive. Anna begins to play poker for money online and quickly starts making a profit.
  • 2005 Another management upheaval. I’m now completely free of employment obligations (as long as the money holds out).
  • 2006 We move to Las Cruces, NM, so I can find a job in the Space 2.0 industry. While looking for work, I discovered that NMSU had just started offering an Aerospace Engineering degree, so I went back to college.