Michael Roberts

I'm a hacker of long standing, having programmed professionally since 1986 and breaking into open source in about 2000.  I've been online longer than nearly anybody you know; vivtek.com was registered in September of 1997.  I prefer Perl for my programming work.

I programmed for money until the 2001 recession, when I found that I'm a pretty good programmer but a lousy manager (especially self-manager) and I couldn't make a sole proprietorship based on software consulting fly.  I switched to my other hat, languages, starting to do professional technical translation in 2004 and building that into a freelance job that now amounts to about 1.25 million words a year transiting my brain, sometimes leaving an impression.  Since I've been doing translation for the bread and butter, I've been working on software as a hobby, and doing lots of interesting first halves of projects.  It always builds character, though.

Politically, I'm a Hoosier Quaker liberal, meaning I believe in self-reliance but a social safety net, and I still think society can be engineered to work better than it does.  I've long thought that improved access to reliable information would restore something of the American democracy I was brought up to love, and I hope our little journalism class will help me figure out how to help.

My personal life has three items of interest: my wife is Hungarian (and a theoretical physicist), my two children have two different incurable diseases (making me somewhat more focused than most on medical care and its abysmal state in America), and my house was built in 1886, is made of brick, and cost me $8000 a year ago.  (Yes, I blog it, if you're into old-house porn.  I've learned a lot of masonry in the last year.)

I lived in Germany for two years right out of college, and we lived in Puerto Rico for nearly four years total, up to buying our old house a year ago.

That's basically the checklist of what I think makes me interesting.