Personal Details about Roedy Green

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Roedy Green taken 2008-05-24

Roedy Green is an independent computer consultant with 45 years experience available for speaking, consulting or contract programming work on socially significant projects involving Java, Abundance, Assembler or the Internet.

Contact and Identification

	Internet email:	feedback for publication:I am swamped with mail. I am years behind in answering. please don’t take offense if I don’t respond immediately.
		support:
		personal mail:
	website:	http://mindprod.com
	address:	Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products #101 - 2536 Wark Street Victoria, BC Canada V8T 4G8 Latitude +48" 25’00"N, Longitude -123" 22’00"W
	telephone:	(250) 361-9093 (please use email in preference to telephone)

born: 1948-02-04 shortly before midnight, age 60 years and 9 months.

marital status: attached but not married.

name on birth certificate: Munroe Frederic Compton Green.

nickname: Roedy which rhymes with Cody, pronounced Rho-Dee accent on the first syllable. This is a nickname derived from Munroe, my school days name.

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transcript

nome de plume: Gaius. Gaius speaks for planet earth, through me as a channel and translator. Transcribing Gaius’s thoughts is much like playing charades. The name Gaius is rich with associations in the Pagan, Roman and Christian traditions.

Rates

I also work on a hourly basis for consulting, brainstorming, coaching, trouble shooting etc. Again, there my rate is based on your ability to pay and how valuable the work is to the planet. I usually charge charities $25.00 CAD per hour, individuals $50.00 USD per hour and and businesses $60.00 USD per hour.

Interests

This includes in roughly descending order: Ending the Iraq war. Removing Republicans from power. Protecting the environment. Fair treatment of the third world. Relaxing the taboos that are holding our populations too high. Communication with cetacea and other animals including humans. Pranging (stunts that break people’s conditioned patterns or addictions). Writing essays. Frogs. Africa. Tropical reefs.

My whole life, starting in childhood has been mainly about various causes: in roughly the chronological order they came to my attention:

1. reducing pesticides
2. animal cruelty
3. nuclear disarmament
4. gay lib
5. eliminating dogmatic religions
6. ending war
7. protecting the environment, protecting forests, water pollution, air pollution, garbage recycling.
8. protecting whales and dolphins
9. ending hunger
10. unversal health care
11. global warming
12. fair treatment of domestic animal
13. impeaching George Bush
14. homelessness

Salient facts

• loves speaking to large audiences.
• Uses humour to gently introduce revolutionary ideas. Talks in metaphors with hidden meaning. Actively implementing plans to reshape the world.
• I prefer contract work in Java, Abundance or assembler. I’d also be interested in working with Smalltalk, but I don’t have experience with it yet.
• donated his fully paid for house to charity in the spring of 1985 to help out with the Ethiopian famine.
• started Gay Lib in western Canada back in 1969. This has lead to spirited battle ever since with the Kristians.
• HIV+ since summer of ’85 (the AIDS rabbit died, but I’m still alive.)
• Wrote an article in ’86 October Byte Magazine on Abundance. It is a computer language that can jaunt (run forward and backward in time). Its philosophy is radically different from the mainstream. You can download the public domain compiler.
• Wrote the public domain BBL (Big Black Lady) 32-bit Forth compiler. JPL told me they used it as a base for their compiler to control unmanned space craft.
• Worked with John Lilly at the Human Dolphin Foundation. Wrote an electronic Etch-A-Sketch controlled by delphinic whistles. Took dolphins on their first tour of the human world using an video camera and underwater video monitor. Worked on project Janus. Present at the first experiment in 1979-11. Swimming with the dolphins was something else. This is not how I did it, but you could try any number of places to arrange a swim.
• Wrote Optow - a program that designed most of the transmission lines in BC and Brazil. It was the first time I discovered the whole was more than the sum of its parts. It had a "style" and "personality" I had no intention of programming in — it just emerged out of the low level detail.
• Types with a Kinesis Classic keyboard in DSK.

  

  The idea of Dvorak is the most common characters are in your home row, and the least common in the bottom row. I could not touch type QWERTY without severe wrist pain. With DSK I can type for hours a day at up to 100 WPM without discomfort.

• IBM told me that I was at one point the youngest computer programmer in the world. This was back in the days when having access to the white coat and locked computer rooms was like being a child astronaut.
• wants to learn new languages including Esperanto, Chinese, Tagalog, Bahasa Indonesia, Arabic and an African language. I am most interested in grammar and how language determines what you can think.
• Past president of Apples BC.
• I was known across Canada for my monthly column in The Computer Paper in the early days of personal computers explaining the technology in layman’s terms.
• CMP used to manufacture custom computers and custom software. Some of the more interesting projects were reverse engineering the controls at Woodwards Department stores replacing an IBM Series/1 mini with an AT to schedule the lights and fans, writing a program to match lost and found cats for the Humane Society, managing bond sales for the State of Israel, managing financial records for Talmud Torah School and tracking all the testing and licensing of all 120,000 liquor servers in BC. Mostly though we did donation tracking systems for charities. CMP now is more involved with the human biocomputer.
• I used to co-chair the Q&A session each month at VPCUS, the Vancouver PC User Society.
• In 1985 I had a conversation with the head of Tata, the General Motors of India. He was Gandhi’s godson. we talked about Gandhi. We also talked about India’s future as a software giant. He later left me to explore his private museum of Gandhi memorabilia. Since then, Tata has become a software giant in its own right. I like to think my ebulliant conversation about India’s future helped give him confidence to pursue that tack.
• In 1995 I started the notes for the Java glossary. It has since grown to a useful resource to the entire planet to learn Java.
• Starting in 2000, I started writing about American politics, the crooked election, 9/11 and the Iraq war, attempting to derail the Nazification of America. If my work cuts the war short by even a day, I have not lived in vain.

Loves

People I Would Most Like To Meet I Have Not Met Yet

Formal Education

Non-Military Use Only

All the software I write is marked, for non-military use only with the exception of U.N. Peacekeeping Missions. This would include any use by the military, not just battle. It also includes work by contractors for the military such as interrogation or torture or even managing a payroll. This obviously does not include the Afghanistan or Iraq wars which are both illegal wars of aggression. The way I look at it, the military has become bloated out of all plausible motive for defense. It is a parasite on the planet. I don’t in any way want to contribute to it. The way I look at it, if a nuclear war kills all six billion of us, the 1,000,000 people who had any hand in it, however indirect, each killed 6,000 people, dwarfing Timothy McVeigh’s crime. I want absolutely no part of such criminality.

People often get very angry about this restriction. I find it odd that they have no quarrel with software that restricts its use to non-commercial purposes. I find that baffling. Why would you want to discourage commerce and encourage killing?

The angriest I have ever been in my life was when a military contractor, Rockwell, refused to stop using my RESTORE software to distribute theirs. Their representative asked for special exemption. I said "No He said, Fuck you! we are going to use it anyway.. Some years later, Rockwell apologised and said they would not use it.

People are welcome to include any of my code in their programs. But of course that requires that new code bear the same restriction.

A Zen master presented his student with a valuable box, with the stipulation that it must always face east. The student took the box and placed it in his room. However to place the box east, he had to place the table against the wall on the opposite side of the room. This meant he had to move the bed. This made getting in and out of the room awkward, so he had to move the doorway in the wall. This caused a structural weakness in the house which required…

You may incorporate my code into your own products so long as those products are not primarily for military use. If you used my code in your drafting program for example, and the military used it, you would be ok. If you used it in a drafting program for nuclear submarines, then you would not. You are not required to enforce the non-military use-only clause, just leave it visible in the programs distributed.

People often try to talk me out of my non-military use restriction. How would you feel if you discovered software you wrote were being used to run a child pornography ring? I feel even more revolted by the military. I simply can’t aid and abet that sort of illegal actvity which so many people, especially Americans, consider perfectly acceptable, namely maiming, killing and torturing children. I am baffled that so many people put their creations out into the world with blanket permission to use them for any imaginable or illegal purpose.

Dash 30 Dash

1. 30 was part of the old 19th century Phillips telegraph code for “finished”.
2. In longhand news stories, authors used X to indicate the end of a sentence, XX for a paragraph end, and XXX for story end. XXX is the Roman numeral for 30.
3. The maximum length of slugs that a typesetting machine could cast was 30 ems, so 30 meant the end of a line at story end, to separate it from next story.
4. According to one story, the convention originally started back in the 1920s or 30s as a solidarity signal requesting a raise to $30.
5. Supposedly, the first telegraph (in the Civil War) to a press association, was 30 words, and the sender ended it with that number, the word goodnight, and his name, and the 30 stuck.
6. The maximum number of messages each member of the Associated Press could send was 30, and this marked a quota.
7. Some claim a reporter named Thirtee sent a story with his name and the operator changed it to a number.

TV Shows

Click on network to see TV listings page.

The Backyardigans

Oddly one of my favourite TV Shows is targeted at pre-schoolers. It is called The Backyardigans. It is about five cartoon animals, Tyrone a laid-back moose, Austin a shy kangaroo, Pablo an excitable penguin, Uniqua a feminist pink spotted animal, and Tasha a slightly bossy yellow hippopotamus. They have adventures of imagination in their common backyard. Watching this show puts a huge smile on my face and a generates a gentle euphoria. Part of what pleases is that I thoroughly approve of this show to indoctrinate the young. Its characters are curious, kind, considerate, positive and supportive — excellent role models. Each episode highlights a different musical genre with amusing original singable songs, a song parody and some simple dances. The 3D animation is smooth and at times super real, e.g. moving water, or tiny horses, with plenty of loving detail. The actors who do the voices are reasonably accomplished child singers. This show does not patronise kids with silly, pretending-to-be-stupid, shrill adults masquerading as children.

Preferences

• colours: yellow, orange, lime green.
• music: classical.
• flatware: Oneida Paul Revere pattern.
• dinnerware: Denby Energy pattern in dark brown and light green.
• clothes: Tilley Endurables: durable, plain, solid colours.
• Keyboard: Kinesis DSK Classic QD.
• food: stir fry, low fat, low salt, low sugar, pretty well anything but sushi.
• drink: all juices, non-alcoholic.
• comedy: Dana Carvey, Jack Lemmon, Woody Allen, John Morgan.

Links

• quotations
• musings
• people I love
• computers I love
• my ideal partner
• My Profile: on the Opera browser site
• Movie Reviews I have written
• Amazon Book & DVD Reviews I have written.

Family and Friends

It is not important that you agree, but that you think the issues on this website through for yourself. I’m often wrong and I’m eager to hear the correct answers.

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