He takes the plunge!
It seems I was not the only one who wasn’t fond of moving to New York. 3D/Eye was having trouble hiring people and decided to relocate part of their team to Atlanta, Georgia. It would still be close to Ithica, and they would staff the sales, marketing, and administrative tasks there, along with part of the development team that wanted to get out of New York. Most of the developers stayed in the office they had built in Ithica.
I moved into a small, one-bedroom apartment in a vast, sprawling complex with hundreds, if not thousands of units. I had put Valhalla up for sale and didn’t want to commit to anything more at that point. For the next ten months, I worked 12+ hours a day. I pushed myself way outside of my comfort zone in the startup environment. We had a seemingly unending bank account and spent money like it was there to burn. I spent lots of time traveling back and forth to the West Coast.
My job was to build a third-party business. This entailed working with other applications that would work with our products. We took a Swiss army knife approach to this and provided output in many different flavors to work with those applications. And we were inexpensive, a fraction of what other applications cost. Unfortunately, the product had a hard time doing any real work. It was flashing to demo and impressive with its ability to produce highly realistic rendering, animations, and other trick stuff. But the models were rather crude and fell apart easily. It also intimidated a lot of other companies used to selling high-dollar software.
Pissing with Paul
At one point, towards the end of 3D/Eye, Paul Allen showed up with some lawyers to put the screws to my boss Samir in our Atlanta office. One of the founders of Microsoft, he had left after being diagnosed with some chronic malady. Miraculously, he went into remission and started spending all his Microsoft bucks doing his own thing. We were one of them.
Anyway, I needed to take a piss and went to the restroom to find Paul Allen standing at one of the urinals! “Holy shit,” I thought to myself as I stood next to him in the next urinal over. At this point in Paul Allen’s life, he was huge – overweight and had a very slovenly appearance. He looked like a street person. Fortunately, he was near completion and stepped away before it got awkward.
After 10 months of heads down, it all came to a stand-still on Halloween 1996. We all gathered together in the conference room to hear that we were fucked and out of money π€£. The plan was to find someone to buy us while a reduced staff kept their heads down. This continued until early 1997 when we merged with Visionary Design Systems (VDS). At one point, it looked like I would move back to Seattle! Paul Allen’s Vulcan Ventures funded us, and they had the idea to merge us with another one of his failed software attempts based there. Fortunately, this did not materialize. At one point, we had hopes that Microsoft would acquire us. No, go on that one π!
Once we merged with VDS, it seemed like we had some breathing room. I started working for a manager in California who gave me responsibility for a new version of our higher-end modeler. There was not a lot of difference in the product, but it was now specifically targeted as a professional tool. So, in other words, we jacked up the price, repackaged it, and renamed it SolidTools instead of the rather mysterious name TriSpectives.
I had never expected to live in Atlanta. One of the things that made the idea more palatable was being closer to my family. I started visiting them often, especially my brother Dave and his family in Panama City. It was a mere 5-hour drive from Atlanta. I also visited Cocoa Beach regularly. I tried to ski as often as possible on business trips that took me out west. I did a great dive trip to Papua New Guinea in 1997.
I moved out of the tiny apartment and rented a house outside the city in Acworth. It was an inexpensive home but met my needs well. I set up a shop in the garage and started woodworking again. In 1997, I bought a new set of drums – some 25 years after selling my original set. I started playing again and slowly added more cymbals and other stuff to hit.
At work, we finally introduced our first significant rework of TriSpectives. It had the rather controversial name of IronCad. It had a lot of improvements that inched it towards being a competitive CAD product. It was packaged more like a retail product, and our new marketing manager gave it a fun, refreshing spin with the new name. It pissed a lot of the old die-hard CAD guys off but had a good buzz. I switched my focus to working with third parties again, especially in Europe, that would resell this product. I started working for a new manager, John, who was in Atlanta. Things were looking pretty good.
When I was living in Colorado with my BMW 325iS, BMS introduced the M3. Based on the new E36 body style, it had a 2.3 liter, 24-valve motor and a more aggressive tuning. I liked it and swore I would buy one if they ever made a convertible. Well, they did, and I did. In late 1998, I picked up a new, factory-ordered red M3 convertible. I sold the 325iS with low miles and made good money on it. The new car was a blast to drive and looked stunning with the top down!
For my birthday the same year, I decided to skydive. What a rush! The first part was like sticking your head out of a car window, going 120 mph until the chute opened. Then, it was quiet and calm. Until the landing – that is π€£.
While all this was happening, I met a woman named Gail with a young daughter, Lindsay. We got married after a very short engagement in January 1999. My life once again took a sharp turn. I had no idea what I was getting into. But I had never let that stop me in the past. Boy, did I even screw the pooch on that one!
We bought a massive home in northeast Atlanta, and presto – instant family. Gail decided we needed a dog and bought a puppy of the same breed as the neighbor had. His name was Max, and he was a Tibetan Terrier. It was the first time I owned a dog. Max immediately chewed up one of our couches! However, I was intrigued by the breed and ended up owning several later.
I did a lot of work on that house: building decks, remodeling the living spaces, hardwood floors, etc. I had a fantastic wood shop and traded my old Sears contractor saw for a proper Delta cabinet saw. I did some cool projects, including a sewing cabinet and router table. I set up my drums in the basement and kept banging away – adding some more stuff and trying to play to CDs.
When I was living in Colorado, this new technology called the Internet and the World Wide Web came along. I was intrigued and an early adopter of the technology. After moving back from Germany, I bought my PC and started using Compuserve for email and early newsgroup stuff. I remember the first time I used a web browser and started exploring the web. One of my first recollections was watching an early webcam of the Oklahoma City bombing. This stuff had potential!
I registered the domain tubridy.net and built my first web presence in 1998. Previously, at work, I built a portal for our third parties for product updates and downloading marketing materials. I was using the infamous Microsoft FrontPage to build the pages. I registered tubridy.net with Yahoo and started building my first personal web presence. I have owned the domain ever since, although the days of FrontPage are long gone.
Fast forward to 1999. Everything was now about the web. Nobody cared anymore about packaged software. Everything would move to the web. The web was the place to be! (As it turned out – it was true!)
The companies backing our business decided a CAD product was old news. So, we spun off IronCAD and re-invented ourselves as a web-based product. The idea would be that teams could collaborate on 3D designs in real-time using nothing more than the Internet. We needed to do this – plus nobody else was doing it.
We spent millions on a consultant to develop our new name: Alventive. Get it? All + Invent. Cool, actually π. We spent much more money sending the whole company to the Bay area for a Hollywood-inspired company ‘launch’. We all had visions of huge stock options and getting rich!
The only problem was that we did not have anything resembling a product. What we did have was a new-breed Silicon Valley marketing manager who could spin a hell of a PowerPoint presentation. We hired a ringer sales rep in Canada who set up a $10M deal for a large electronics manufacturer based on the promised functionality. We were all going to be rich! My job was to work with third parties who we would need to make it work – if it came to that π€£.
At one point, they tried to get us to buy our options, telling us what a tax advantage it would be. Not to mention, the cash would be helpful since we were essentially running out of money again! I looked in amazement as my co-workers took the bait. By the beginning of 2002, it was all over. I was laid off for the first (but not the last) time in my career. To make life interesting, I got divorced in the middle of this.
I ended up getting a new job almost immediately with my former boss, John, who had jumped ship with our former Sales Manager, whom I also worked for directly at one point in the past. My new employer, iManage, was a leading supplier of document management systems for the legal profession. The technology was similar to the work I did at Hewlett-Packard. iManage was a small public company with a very different culture than I used to. I would do a similar job to my work with IronCAD at VDS.
After I got divorced, I moved into an apartment in north Atlanta. I used the severance money I got from VDS to buy a new set of Roland electronic drums. Setting up my full-sized kit was impossible, and I liked how the electronic drums sounded.
911
Several life events burn in my memory. The first was when JFK was assassinated in the early 1960s. I remember being at school staring at the loudspeaker installed in every classroom on the wall. The little girl next to me started crying. I couldn’t fathom what it meant…
I was helping conduct a multi-day training in a hotel in downtown Chicago. I was finishing getting everything ready for the day’s training when a colleague told me an aircraft had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York City. I looked it up online and found an article that said a private plane had crashed into one of the towers.
I eventually went back to my hotel room and turned on the TV. I could not believe what I saw. Suddenly, out of the corner of the screen, another aircraft appears and hits the other tower. All I remember the announcer saying was something like ‘Oh My’…
I was scared shitless. The Sears Tower was mere blocks away, and I was sure it was next. At one point, I started running north, away from the downtown area. I stopped within a few blocks, sensing the futility of my decision. I sat in the bar area the rest of the morning to watch the news. Eventually, we got a plan together to ensure all of our clients were cared for.
Fortunately, we had a rental car. The next day, we drove from Chicago to Atlanta. I remember us going by an airport in Kentucky that was a FedEx hub. Grounded airplanes were parked all over the taxiways. There were hardly any cars on the road. We made it home by evening.
I was traveling weekly now, spending time in god-forbidden places like Chicago in mid-winter! I got back together with my ex-wife to see if I could shave a few more years off my life. I was in Chicago when 9/11 went down, scared to death that the Sears Tower would be next! The net effect was another downturn in business. We did a lot of business with law firms in New York and New Jersey. As a small, publicly traded company, we were slaves to quarterly earnings. Things were not looking good.
In the Fall of 2002, Dad unexpectedly passed away. His health had been deteriorating badly in recent years as he battled his demons πΉ. It caught up with him shortly after his 73rd birthday. I was also battling my demons again πΉ. Things were not looking good.
I ended up laid off from iManage, estranged from Gail after she found out I was drinking, and in rehab. Are we having fun yet π΅βπ«?
Gail Mitchell – 1/15/1953~ 2/20/2024
Gail passed away yesterday (as I write this) from ALS. According to her daughter Lindsay, the disease was particularly cruel to Gail. Despite this, her indomitable spirit prevailed as she tried everything to overcome a death sentence. It didn’t work, and she died with my one-time arch nemesis Ron and her daughter Linsday at her side.
Click here for the saga of VMT
Gail and Lindsay were a force of nature. I was no match for them. Gail openly admitted wanting to be rescued, and I was happy to do it for her. So much so that we tried a second time. My demons finally caught up with me, and that was that.
She once told me that I didn’t really love her and Lindsay; I just loved the idea of them. Ouch! But it was true.
We met through a video dating service. These were popular in the late 90s. Essentially, you paid a shit-load of money to gain access to a ring of men and women looking to meet each other. You rent a video and watch it. If you like what you see, you send them a message. That’s exactly what happened. She sent me a message.
The funny thing was, when I originally got the flyer for the video service in the mail, I threw it away. I actually went back and dug it out and called the number. The rest, as they say, is history.
She talked about her quest for the perfect note on her videotape, clear and preferably from a Woman Celtic singer. She had been frequenting an Irish bar before me, and I guess that was her comeback to a pickup line. The funny thing is – it described her to the tee. Perfectly, absolutely, and with an amazing finality.
A woman who knew what she was looking for. Perfection! Instead of taking warnings like any sane bipedal ape descendant with an oversized cranium, I let my long-dormant hormones take over.
We had a whirlwind courtship of about three months and flew off to San Diego to get married – the three of us. We called ourselves VMT. We were going to conquer the world!
It started like some fucking suburban wet dream. We bought a huge house, got a dog, and became an instant family! We took a nice vacation to the outer banks and spent time with my family in the Keys.
The next two years went downhill rapidly, leading to her famous St Valentine’s Day massacre statement about her perception of my professed love. We split up. I found a bunch of messages from the guy she was fucking on our answering machine and nearly got drunk.
I dated a wild, sex-hungry tennis player with fake boobs. It was fun, and I felt like a king super-stud. When it came to signing the divorce papers, she changed her mind. Fuck it, I said, and we went through with the divorce.
She told me about wanting to be rescued and went about doing it again. She told me I knew Lindsay and her. She told me she had a dream of us being together again. We had a final meeting, which I initially declined but waived and agreed to.
She struck again! She left a picture of herself in my bathroom before we said our final, forever goodbyes.
Two weeks later, we were back together. I essentially made the same decision I did when I threw that fucking ad for the video dating service in the trash – and it forever changed my life again.
WFT – over?
I took the analyst’s advice and treated Lindsay like a grandchild. I could do that. And it worked! We went through 911 together, and that made us stronger. We even had some good trips together, and I felt closer to her than I had felt for a long time.
Work was getting to be really stressful. I was making more money than I ever had but feeling more and more like I was going through the motions. No one gave much of a shit about my wonderfully decorated past. I found myself hating my job.
More importantly, I hated myself. I found myself back where I was before. What was I going to do this time? I was fucking trapped.
We had regularly joined a group of Gail’s friends at Cumberland Island in the early Summer. We made plans to do it, and I told them I would be taking a few days off. My boss then told me that no one could take off at the end of the quarter! Work! Work! Feed the hungry Wall Street Wolves!
It rained the whole time we were there. Late on the second night, I couldn’t sleep and got up for a while. What happened was right out of the Big Book of AA. I thought, let me have a few beers and relax. That’s all, nothing more…
The sad part is those couple of beers didn’t even get me drunk. No, I waited until several weeks later and chugged half a bottle of some sickening liquor that Gail had. I was sick as a dog the next day. Several weeks later, I did it again. After that, it was all I could do to get a buzz every day. Right in front of Gail and Lindsay on the weekends. I think part of me had given up. But also, just like they say, I returned right to where I left off some 17 years earlier.
Gail grew to despise me before finally figuring out what I was doing. Lindsay caught me and told her. I felt as low as low gets. I tried AA, and it worked until it didn’t several months later. She figured it out much quicker the next time.
And to throw a gorilla-sized monkey wrench into the mix, my father drops dead of alcoholism-related illness. I remember thinking to myself on the plane ride to Florida that my drinking was done, only to get drunk after his funeral.
When we first got together, I learned of Ron. At that time, Ron was working for Gail. At an offsite meeting, they hooked up and started sleeping with each other. Big problems – he was married, and he worked for her! The second was a very big violation from HR and one of the few ways you can actually be terminated from a government position. Things were dire!
Gail went looking for other ways to solve her loneliness. Enter yours truly. I knew about Ron from the beginning, and she was (to her credit) honest about it. But Gail was extremely concerned about appearances, and being a home wrecker would make her look bad.
I pretty much felt like her second choice from the beginning. My bad.
When we split up the first time, she went to him for relief and didn’t care if I knew it or not. I had moved out and nearly started drinking again. If only. I remember finding out his email and sending him a nasty message (which he claimed not to have received).
The second time around, she went back to him and then came home and kicked me out of the bedroom. I got drunk several weeks later and ended up in rehab. Turns out that I had worked with Gail to choose the Postal Employee Health Plan as our health plan provider. They have very, very good coverage for addiction. Go figure. The end of the second marriage came when she told me she wanted to separate as I finished my 6-week stint at Camp Sunshine (Ridgeview).
Gail married Ron at some point. I guess when it was cool that he no longer worked for her. Laura told me they also had to wait because Ron’s kid was a fuck-up. It made sense, given how all of it went down.
Now, some 20 years later, I hear from my friend Laura – who herself is battling pancreatic cancer – that Gail is sick. Several weeks later, I heard from Sally’s first husband, Cory.
Cory worked with Gail quite by coincidence when I met Sally. They were peers and interacted a lot in the work environment. They bonded as friends after I came into the picture and started taking vacations together. I was somewhat surprised by this, but it all made perfect sense.
When I moved to Florida in 2014, I rekindled my friendship with my childhood friend Laura. I asked her to forgive me for being an absolute asshole to her after I hooked up with Sally. She had become Gail and, more importantly, Lindsay’s friend during our time together.
I wrote Gail a note and asked Laura to give it to her. It was my feeble attempt at telling Gail I was sorry for being such a dick. Laura told me that she responded that the contents were ‘unexpected.’
Cory’s note told me he and Gail had talked about me. They have had several heart-to-heart conversations, undoubtedly fueled with glasses of wine (knowing the two of them).
He told me that Gail always had good things to say about me. Although I know she would not want to appear to hold any animosity towards me, that Cory could be a sappy sentimentalist, I’ll choose to believe her as one last leap of faith.
It made me feel good. Selfish prick!
But all of this helped me bring closure. And now I can play Pure and Easy, with that great opening verse, and think of her. It may take me a while longer to re-pack the crappy baggage she had a hand in.
Mourning time is over, and we are back to life.
I was stunned and saddened to learn of this. Interestingly enough, I heard from Cory Berish, Sally’s first husband and father of her children. He was a colleague of Gail’s, and they became friends after bonding over the antics of their respective exes. He replied to an email I had sent ten years earlier.
What a tangled web we weave!
The story continues…
At this point, I was living in a halfway house near home.
I met my third wife, Sally, in rehab, and we decided we could fix each other, so we moved in together. It’s a really bad idea π. She had a house in the same general neighborhood in what is now known as Brookhaven. One of the jokes in AA is: “How can you tell two alcoholics are on their second date? They rent a U-Haul π€£!”
Sally had a female Doberman Pinscher named Annie. I decided I needed a dog of my own and got Samwise, a Tibetan Terrier, from a breeder in Florida. I took to being a dog owner despite the trouble and expense. I aspire to be the person my dog thinks I am!
So I moved in with her. For a while, I worked on RVs at a place way the hell in the northern part of Atlanta. I did some custom installation on an old Grumman bus owned by a guy who was married to the heiress of the Honey Baked Ham business. He was fitting it to be an RV, and the work we were doing was fucked up, cutting holes everywhere trying to fit 5 pounds of shit into a 2-pound can! It was a cool-looking bus, though! The guy running the place was a defrocked attorney who now swindled people whenever he could. Big fun!
Then, out of the blue, I was contacted by my old boss, Samir, who knew I was looking for a job. His new company, Hanna Strategies, contracted with the leading design company Autodesk on their PDM products. PDM – short for Product Data Management – was the term for my old HP product WorkManager. So, I was familiar with the technology. Samir needed someone to specify the design of the products and work with the development team to produce them. Although I had no direct experience, he trusted I could learn how to do the job.
Over the next four years, I traveled frequently to Detroit, where this Autodesk product’s main development and marketing was. It was common to go up every week and stay only for the day. I got sick of traveling before this was all over. However, I enjoyed what I was doing and saw a way I could morph my career away from Marketing to product development. It proved to be a wise move (for once).
Sally was into cruising and music. She was also a clothes horse. She liked fast cars. We had a lot of fun together with the dogs. We bought a new, bigger house less than a mile away. She had a couple of teenage daughters with whom we did stuff for and with. But early into our relationship, she started showing symptoms of mental illness. Well – what do they say – we are all mentally ill to some degree π.
We bought a modern house near where she lived and married in 2004. I set up a shop in the basement and upgraded some of my machines. I did several great projects in that shop, including my TV cabinet, coffee table, and blanket chest. I also set up my drum again and started to add to the set. My idea was to build a massive set with many things to hit. I accomplished that goal – and then some!
We took many vacation trips. We regularly went to the beach in the Cape San Blas area of Florida, where dogs were allowed, and we took a couple of trips to the Caribbean.
On one of our trips to Turks and Caicos, I rented a scooter to run around the island. I liked it so much that I bought one when we got home.
It was a Piaggio Fly 150 – bright red, of course! I drove it regularly to the gym and other places.
We also did a great cruise to Hawaii in 2008.
After four years working for Autodesk, we were acquired in 2007. Our team switched focus to develop products similar to what I did in the late 1990s with TriSpectives. The idea would be to allow someone to produce documentation from 3D CAD models like a specialized version of PowerPoint. Things got pretty hectic. Meanwhile, the economy tanked in 2008 due to the 2008 financial crisis. I was laid off for the third time! Yikes!
I enjoyed my work at Hanna and Autodesk way more than the marketing stuff from my previous jobs. I thought about what I like to do, and it became clear that my passion is creating. I have expressed it with my woodworking, music, photography, and computer software. The work at Autodesk opened my eyes to a new career in multimedia design – specifically for the internet. It was called User Experience Design and will be how I could end my career positively.
President Obama gave me some money to go to Emory University and take courses in multi-media design. It mainly was training on Adobe web creation tools. I bought a rather expensive full suite of products and went about learning them. I taught myself HTML and CSS. I created websites and learned how to do photo, video, and audio editing and publishing to the web. I scoured the web for resources on User experience design and read half a dozen books. I built some complex websites. I developed a real-life application for one of my friend’s businesses using the now-defunct Flash. I was a web god!
We got a third dog after seeing an article on a designer dog called a Morkie. Naturally, we named her Mindy! She was a Maltese-Yorkshire Terrier mix and was as cute as could be. Sally then decides her daughter needs a rescue Doberman Pinscher named Bella. Unfortunately, her daughter flaked out on us, and now we had four dogs! Probably not a good idea, but it was sort of the way things were going in general with Sally – out of control.
I carefully crafted listings for the job websites and did a couple of contract jobs for Autodesk and a local homebuilder.
Dreamtime Creative Design
I have been a fan of the band Yes since the late 1960s – especially their lead singer, Jon Anderson. An old hippie who always saw the light – he would sing songs about our ancestors. In particular, the concept of our mythology arises from our dreams. The aboriginal people of Australia call it the Dreamtime.
When I visited Australia in 1991, I toured Alice Springs and visited Uluru. I could imagine the indigenous peoples gathered around the campfires, spinning stories about the giant rock in the middle of nowhere and how it came to be.
The world was once a featureless place. None of the places we know existed until creator beings, in the forms of people, plants and animals, traveled widely across the land. Then, in a process of creation and destruction, they formed the landscape as we know it today. AαΉangu land is still inhabited by the spirits of dozens of these ancestral creator beings which are referred to as Tjukuritja or Waparitja.
Legends of the Native Austrailian People
Made a lot more sense than some omnipresent being creating it in 7 days.
To be this is indeed the hallmark of human creativity. Storytelling, mythology. We passed our history down around the campfire, hoping we wouldn’t get eaten that night.
I planned to start a company if my job search failed. I did a few jobs and realized I didn’t know the first thing about having my own company. I did a job for Autodesk involving training and discovered the joys of paying taxes when you work for yourself. Fortunately, I was able to get a job as a contractor and let someone else worry about this shit.
In August 2010, my hard work paid off, and I got a contract position as a user experience designer with IBM’s third-party group. My background in software marketing proved to be a plus. I would work remotely with a team in the Bay Area and Austin, Texas.
I worked with a global team and would design pages for marketing IBM’s software products to third parties. They would access our PartnerWorld portal to get the latest information, sales tools, and support for selling IBM’s huge catalog of software products. I did a lot of rapid prototyping, which everyone loved because they could see almost the finished product quickly. I quickly became a web god, and all my customers loved me. Understanding their needs from my past lives came in handy. Yay for me!
We bought a Mercedes-Benz ML 430 when we got married. I had a Lexus RX300 with Gail and liked the whole SUV thing. I would have liked to buy a BMW, but they were pricy. The MB was a great car to travel in – a very comfortable ride but ultimately dull.
Sally was a car nut like me, so we upgraded in 2012 to a used, bright red Porsche Cayenne S. Boy. That was a fun car to drive! A 5000-pound Porsche 911 – almost! It was also the most expensive car I’ve ever owned to maintain. You could easily go 100 miles per hour without even noticing. Amazing!
Meanwhile, the M3 was fun to drive but got a bit long in the tooth after 100,000 miles and a lot of commuting. I had always heard that some people who buy a convertible come to regret it, and it appeared I was one of those.
BMW introduced the Z3 in the mid-1990s. I liked it but did not care for the somewhat clownish appearance. Looked a little like a toy car. Around the time I bought the M3, they introduced a version of the Z3 with the same components as the M3. One version, the M Coupe, had a very unusual shooting brake design – a continuous roofline based on a car that is not a station wagon -and was pioneered by Ferrari. I wasn’t aware of them until they became a cult car. I fell in love with the unique styling despite its clownish appearance. They are affectionately known as a ‘clown shoe.’
I searched the internet. They were going up in price compared to the M3, which had lost almost all its value. I found one in Oregon. I was red with less than 100,000 miles. I took the chance and bought it. It arrives on a makeshift car carrier with many old beat-up pickup trucks bound for the Caribean! It cleaned up nicely and proved to have the amazing handling and performance it boasted. It has the best ass on any car I’ve ever seen π€£!
Eventually, Sally’s mental illness became too much to take. Since I was working remotely, I decided it was finally time to move back to Florida. Sammy would come with me. Annie had passed a few years earlier, but I couldn’t take Bella. Fortunately, she found a good home thanks to the local Doberman rescue. Mindy ended up staying with Sally. She was a sweet dog but had turned into a yappie little pain in the ass! Sorry to say I didn’t miss her.
Next – Home Again ~ Back to Florida