Thanks to the Marin I.J. for making this page "Site of the Week"
A BIG thanks to the Marin County Fair who awarded this page First Prize for "Best Personal Page" in July, 1996

paul's name

Welcome to my home page on Sonic.net
You Can Reach me here.

As far back as I can remember, my main passions in life have been music, computers and communication. Every once in a while, when all the planets are aligned, I get a chance to work at a job where a couple of these come into play.

In 1971, the same year that I graduated from high school, I became a disk jockey at KTIM FM radio in San Rafael, California. At the time, I was the youngest disk jockey/announcer at a commercial radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area. I followed that up with short stints as a music writer and photographer before falling into the wonderful world of software in 1981. For the past 16 years, I've been involved in the quality assurance and tech support departments of a number of interesting software companies.

For most of the past 30 years, I've had the good fortune of living in Marin County - the "other side of the Golden Gate Bridge" and one of the most beautiful places in the world. It's also perhaps the ultimate rock & roll bedroom community and over the years, it's been the home of an amazing list of musicians, writers and artists. It's also a place with many interesting stories .

For the past year or so, my major new hobby has been acting as the webmaster for Bryndle, a music group made up of Karla Bonoff, Kenny Edwards and Wendy Waldman. I now oversee a rather mammoth website that consists of more than 150 separate html documents - a very large and always growing concern.

To escape the confinements of the computer, I do have a few non-technical outlets. Every summer, I do make at least a few journeys down the Russian River by canoe and in recent years, my new escape is Pinecrest, a small town situated near a lake high in the Sierras. I also do a a fair amount of hiking around the hills and beaches of Marin.

"We are, therefore we work"

Since 1981, I've been in the computer business, mainly doing "software quality assurance management" and "technical support" related work, most recently with multimedia and Internet products. Here's an interesting collection of companies that I've worked for:

MicroPro International/Wordstar - San Rafael, California

Someday someone will write a book about MicroPro - the story of how an innovative company that was the very first to dominate the word processing niche threw it all away. When I worked there in the late 1980s, there were more than 400 employees - today the company doesn't exist.

Software Publishing - Mountain View, California

Another sad story of a company that dominated the presentation graphics market and let it slip away. In the late 80s - early 90s when I worked there, they owned Harvard Graphics, the PFS series of programs, and Profession Write and File. Most have been sold off and the company has been seriously downsizing in recent years.

Berkeley Systems - Berkeley, California

Best known as the maker of "The After Dark Screen Saver". I was the SQA lead on "After Dark 3.0 for Windows" released in 1994 and also was the voice of the stern master in the "Bad Dog" module. There are literally millions of copies of this program installed worldwide - some of them have even been purchased!

Macromedia - San Francisco, California

Of all the places I've worked, Macromedia may just become the hit of the 90s. They develop tools for multimedia authoring and website development. I've worked for them a couple of times and have been part of the teams working on Director 4.04, Shockwave, Action and their Clip Media products. Great products, great people!

Theatrix - Emeryville, California

Based in the East Bay, Theatrix was an educational software company specializing in multimedia products. While it was an exciting place to be, a number of unfortunate business decisions nearly closed the place down in 1997. It was a place where the products won lots of awards but sold very few copies. In 1996, I led a QA team on a product called "Math Heads" that won a Codie award. The company has since closed.

Well Engaged - Sausalito, California

Just a parking lot away from the San Francisco Bay, In 1999 I was the QA manager at Well Engaged. They were an Internet Software company doing some pretty damn exciting stuff with "communities" as an offshoot of "The Well"

Every Picture Tells A Story, Don't It?

Hard at work, Here I am, working in my cube at Macromedia in San Francisco about 1992. This was captured with a video camera and reduced down to a 2 color image. I think it captures my one-dimensional quality perfectly.

Uncle Sam's got nothing on this. This was taken in 1997 at a particularly silly moment at work at Theatrix while playing with the props.

A new concept at amusement parks is for the park to take pictures of you on their rides having fun. I guess it's because there's so little time in the day left to actually have fun anymore. The next time you find yourself working 14 hours a day six days a week, you can pull the picture out and say, "Yeah, here I am having fun"!

This strip of pictures was taken in Santa Cruz, California on the Boardwalk in one of those "carnival type" booths in October of 1991. Three snapshots for a buck.

In 1981, I was arrested for driving my car with expired registration. No, it's not a felony, and I should have just got a ticket but things don't always work out the way they're supposed to. Here's my mug shot. I look like a deer staring at oncoming headlights. (Fortunately, this is the worst trouble I've ever been in.)

This is me, "Radio-boy of the airwaves", at the controls of KTIM FM in San Rafael, California in the early 1970s. I think I was probably 19 or 20 years old at the time.

Taken in 1956, give or take a few years, this one comes straight from the archives. Here I am with my father discussing the pros and cons of a second Eisenhower term in the White House. Ernie retired a few years back as the "chief facility guy" at Berkeley Systems.

Weather or not...

Here's your link to Paul's Weather Page, quickly becoming a Bay Area tradition. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, weather never gets all that severe. Here's an idea of what it looks like right now:

On the right is a Live view of the San Francisco Bay Area as seen from the top of the Fairmont Hotel. The image is updated every 10 minutes.

The direction of the camera changes on a regular basis so it's hard to say what you might see on any given day. Due to the massive amounts of fog that can come into the Bay, it's possible that the image might be very white at times with limited visability. Sybase Software in Emeryville also provides a "Live Cam" view of the Bay as seen from the East Bay.

(Courtesy KPIX Television)

This quick glance of the Bay Area weather comes to you courtesy of KRON - Channel 4. They provide local and national weather reports.

A more extensive look at the Bay Area and the West Coast appears on my Bay Area Weather page.

Thanks for visiting!



Credits

The following programs were used in the development of this page:

The following pages have been created by Paul Grosso:

paul@bryndle.com

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