Hi, I'm Martin!

I still get back to New York a lot.  Here I am on Wall Street doing customer research, December 2001.

I grew up in the 60s and 70s, lucky enough to get a taste of both the big city (New York) and small town life.

Being raised in Manhattan was exhilarating... but I balanced my experience there with other formative underpinnings: Boarding school days spent in tiny Deerfield, Massachusetts... and summers and high school years in Tallahassee, Florida (a college town which tried its hardest to play a convincing second role as the state capital city).

Since those days, my family and I have lived in many interesting places, including long stretches in Boston, Northern California, and most recently Colorado.

So, hello, Boulder...

With our travelled background, it is probably fitting that we are now settled near Boulder, Colorado -- a town that many describe fondly as "Berkeley in the Rockies," and which mixes a bit of 70s West Coast hipness, college town charm, and a broad embrace of the rugged outdoors.

Our border collie ("Java"), and I do a lot of rollerblading together. I skate pretty fast, but Java always wins.

We moved to Boulder from San Francisco in 1999, after several years of tireless lobbying by my wife, Jan, who was exhausted by the 16-hour- a-day grind of producing TV news in San Francisco and numbed by her daily commutes through Bay Area traffic.

Boulder offers a lot of elbow room. Nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, it's still a mile high in altitude and projects a wondrous feeling of open spaciousness. Days are sunny, nights are crystal clear. It's usually so clear at night that the stars shimmer like like pin points, and you can actually still see the Milky Way galaxy.  

Nearby are beautiful national parks, breathtaking views of mountains and canyons, and of course abundant skiing opportunities in Winter.

Denver, representing civilization, is only 30 minutes away, and we avail ourselves frequently of plays, museums, and of course Rockies baseball, and Avs and Broncos games.

Family

I guess we don't think of ourselves as especially traditional, but we do have a pretty 'traditional-looking' family:

Us, in 2001.

Cool Gigs

I've been fortunate to work with many really neat and creative people and to do a variety of different jobs ranging from network radio news reporting to running web and ebusiness teams.

Here's me explaining web design techniques to NBC affiliate KRON-TV in San Francisco. (click for video)

One of the coolest experiences I've had was the three years I spent running our Java technology web site at Sun Microsystems, where we established a following  of more than two million developers and also managed to make news headlines almost every week. Java has turbocharged the computer and consumer electronics world by allowing everything from games to business programs to run flexibly on different devices (from mobile phones to settop boxes to network servers) -- kindof like those electrical "adapter kits" you might take traveling to other countries. Our group on java.sun.com was close knit, creative, and energetic, and we remain good friends to this day. (You can see some of the team and me in the TV news story at right, and can read more in the introductory article I wrote for Sun called "What is Java Technology?").

This is my 20th year at Sun, where I'm currently Director of Customer Experience Design for the sun.com web properties. I've done a number of other interesting projects at Sun, including launching several technical content sites, collaborating on many of our major site redesign efforts, and contributing to our first online help system and also to one of the world's earliest XML/SGML-driven sites. Prior to Sun, I was a software engineer and writer, creating various flavors of accounting and educational software for the PC, Apple, and UNIX markets.

Click to hear my report on National Public Radio's All Things Considered early in my radio career.  (large file, long wait)

Past life: Before I moved into high-tech, I worked for several years in broadcasting. One of my first gigs was as an intern and freelancer for National Public Radio, where I worked with Neil Conan and Bill Toohey, among others. You can hear one of my early reports by clicking the links in the box on the left.

I also did reports for CBS Radio, Associated Press Radio, research for Barron's, and reporting for some small magazines and newspapers.

Writings

I adore writing. I used to write feature articles for java.sun.com and other sites. I also blog regularly on blogs.sun.com. Here are some articles I've written or collaborated on in my spare time:

• Why Wireless Needs Java Technology
• Gadgets, Games, Gizmos and Gas Pumps
  
• Jini^TM Technology Grants the Ultimate Wish
• Java Technology Town at CES
• The Dot-Com Home
• Java Technology and the New Economy
• What is Java Technology?

Wanderlust

Animation Art

Favorite Things

Jan and me.