I am helping the Spix Foundation to define its Mission, Vision, and Plans, and to lead the execution thereof, thereby cementing and extend the legacy of its Founding Patron, George Spix, and his family. This role leverages my experience at The Busselton Challenge, a not-for-profit community foundation that I established and ran in Busselton, Western Australia, back in the early 2000's, and my experience establishing new technology platforms.

COVID froze the legalization of Thailand's cannabis industry for two years starting in early 2020 (and for the next two years also, as it turned out), so I moved into semi-retirement at my Cambodian wife's rice-farming village in Battambang. I had a couple of interesting consulting gigs related to "partner programs" during this time, but mostly, I enjoyed being retired.

Registered as a Thai corporation in 2010, the Thai Cannabis Corporation is the flagship of Thailand's cannabis industry.My first wife, Patti, was killed in 2012 by an accidental overdose of opioid medication prescribed for her chronic pain. When I learned that medicinal marijuana could have treated her pain with no risk of overdose death (https://is.gd/1Kmw7x), I joined the Thai Cannabis Corporation on her behalf, to try to save others from similarly-needless deaths.However, the process of legalization was so slow in Thailand that I left the cannabis industry during the COVID Lockdowns.On the upside, I met my second (and, I hope, final!) wife Samnorl while in Southeast Asia. Living in her poor rice-farming village in Cambodia has opened my eyes and my heart to those less fortunate than myself.

I helped Rackspace to transition from being (in effect) a VAR of other people's software (via hosting) to being a platform vendor (via OpenStack, the open source cloud operating system), and started building out the developer side of its platform ecosystem.Platform evangelism is all about building an ecosystem that welcomes new participants, meets their needs, and gives them the highest possible return on investment over the long haul (whether that return is directly monetary, or is in social capital such as reputation, respect, and social engagement).It was a pleasure to help Rackspace build out the Developer Relations side of its then-new OpenStack ecosystem, while learning about open source culture, processes, and politics from the inside.

Accelerated developer adoption of The Midnight Coders' WebORB, an integration server that facilitated the connection of mobile/client apps with back-end servers.

I formed Thumtronics to develop the Thummer, the world's most expressive electronic musical instrument, based on a breakthrough in music theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_tonality).At Thumtronics, I co-authored a suite of peer-reviewed academic papers on music theory, filed a bunch of patents, joined the Australian Institute of Company Directors, raised money from angel investors, and learned a LOT about forming and running start-up companies, such as: don't do hardware.

I had a fantastic eight years at Microsoft, designing and executing evangelism programs to accelerate the adoption of new technologies in the computer software industry.When I joined, Microsoft's practice of evangelism was very "cowboy," with everyone doing their own thing. That was awesome, in its own way, but I wanted to know how to do evangelism in the most effective manner possible. I worked with Microsoft's evangelists to learn and document their techniques. Then, I started mentoring Microsoft's new evangelists, using their evangelism campaigns to experiment with various techniques. From this, I was able to identify the best practices in technology evangelism, which I taught to all newly-hired evangelists. The gist can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_evangelism.You don't need to take my word for it, though. Read Rusel DeMaria's "Game of X: Volume 2" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07HKPNCTC) and you'll find entire chapters devoted to my work at Microsoft (by which I am quite honored; thanks, Rusel!).My work was so effective that it was cited in three different anti-trust cases against Microsoft as having helped to build Microsoft's "applications barrier to entry," which was alleged to give Microsoft unassailable monopoly power in the market for desktop operating systems (https://is.gd/CyxwcM).Along the way, I held hundreds of meetings with developers, spoke at scores of conferences, wrote dozens of articles on programming topics, and wrote sample code on a plethora of topics. More importantly, I organized other people to do the above, also, turning them into technical resources that could solve problems for Microsoft's partner companies.It was a great job at a great company.

I wrote new Mac and Windows versions of Calendar Creator, PowerUp's cash cow. On the side, I wrote technical articles on computer programming topics, formed a developer's group whose monthly meetings regularly attracted 100+ attendees, and was elected to be among the Directors of a developers' association that had thousands of members across the globe.When Microsoft Publisher out-competed Calendar Creator to death, I remembered the old saying "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em"... so I joined Microsoft.

Software developer on StatView and SuperANOVA, statistical analysis programs for the Macintosh.