Disordered Thoughts



[Me in a suit] Welcome to my little corner of the world. I'm Hank Shiffman, your host on this particular odyssey. Here you'll discover why I'm the most interesting person you're ever likely to know, or at least the most interesting person on this page: reader, writer, music and theatre buff, cartoon enthusiast, Mac advocate, world traveler, Scaper; it's all here or at least should be. So sit back, relax and spend a few minutes trying to make sense of a stream of consciousness, HTML-style. [The casual me]

On the left you see me disguised as a professional. The suit and the designer tie are protective coloration, pulled out for those rare occasions when jeans and an Animaniacs shirt just won't do. This picture, taken while I was at Sun Microsystems, was used for conference programs, magazine articles and the like. It made its last appearance in the November 14, 1994 issue of InformationWeek, after I moved on to Borland. The image on the right reflects my time at Silicon Graphics, which had a more relaxed view of the proper image for Marketing professionals. Or even for people like me.

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The content part of the presentation

* My wide range of interests
* A travel diary: pictures and notes from way too many trips to way too many places
* Closer to home: some examples of Silicon Valley architecture
* A few favorite scenes, scaled for use as desktop backgrounds
* Humble beginnings: a sampling of photos from my first two Australian vacations
* A few memories from my college era Star Trek obsession
* Which resurfaced unexpectedly decades later as a Farscape fixation
* And manifested itself in a new hobby: amateur music videos
* Comments on favorite writers, both mystery and otherwise
* An enduring fascination with cartoons: my collection of animation cels
* A peek into that window into the psyche: my CD collection
* CDs are so last century. I've moved on to an iTunes Music Store blog
* Which led, as these things often do, to a blog on life in general
* Some experiences with scanners, digital cameras and digital video
* Which led to yet another hobby/fledgling business: stock photography
* And which has recently expanded into the wonderful world of studio photography
* A presentation on photography I wrote for the gang at work
* My life in high tech (so far, anyway)
* An employment history, with its various highs and lows
* The more formal version, for when The Economy Strikes Back
* Computers I have known, tolerated or appreciated
* Technical articles I've written over the years:
* Early Java papers debunking some of the hype and discussing where Java really fits, just-in-time translation, JavaBeans & other aspects of JDK 1.1 and the gory details of one of SGI's JDK releases
* A Java chat session I hosted on SGI's Innovate Online web site
* A white paper on Java, Internet appliances and a hardware accelerator,
as well as a related article I wrote for Wireless Design Online
* A white paper on an agent-oriented Java toolkit for natural language user interface
* Slides from various conference talks:
* Java at Scale: Performance & GC - 2012-2013
* Managing Resources in the Enterprise Grid - April, 2004
* An Agent-Based Toolkit For Natural Language Interface - March, 2001
* Evaluating Java Development Tools - October, 2000
* Adapting to Linux: The Business of Open Source - June, 1999
* IRIX/Windows NT Interoperability - April, 1999
* Real-Time Programming on IRIX 6.5 - February, 1999
* Java Matures: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly - January, 1998
* Enhancing Java Performance - August, 1997
* A Java-based Mandelbrot fractal generator, just to prove I can still write a little code when I have to

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