I’m Pete Soper and this is my blog site. It replaced my Sun Microsystems personal blog (that was promised to be “forever and ever” but was erased by Oracle).
Parting with Sun as the closing act after a back to back string of three tech startups starting in 1978 left me wondering who I was and depressed. In late 2011 my dear friend Ed Gaines told me I should get out and do stuff. So I did, ramping up my study of embedded development (that I did at startup #2 and judged the most interesting work I’d done, and thus the type to continue with), but “taking it on the road”. I became a member of the Durham Makerspace (aka Splatspace) and that connected me with Dr Erik Aschehaug, a professor (NCSU postdoc at the time) needing a gadget to help his ecological research group with their study of an endangered species. I re-engaged with the world and established a new sense of self. [Oct 2022 add a “totally” adjective to the following] I’m getting comfortable with being just who I am.
Some explanations. The B24 (that was) at the top of the blog is populated with the soldiers of the 93rd bomb group on a base in SE England during WWII. My father was on that base, maintaining Norden bombsights and the Honeywell automatic flight control systems, training bombardiers and flying in the B24s any chance he got. He later lived just off base with his English bride. Dad’s ashes are there now, mingled with half of Mom’s (the other half of hers being at the family plot in NW England). I’ll eventually change the header graphic (done), as I have no fondness for war but it now seems accidentally appropriate as the USA marches toward war on multiple fronts. (I’ve since changed my mind, as this picture is a decent representation of the fact that war is about people and it tens to be a lot of people with lots of innocent casualties to go along with the “just” casualties. But a better graphic is “in the pipes”)
What is “Bitser”? It was the first nontrivial computer program I wrote when I worked for the University of Alabama in Huntsville psychology department and an acronym layered on the acronym for the human behavioral classification system we invented to capture data during some experiments. Bitser was an analysis program that allowed students of a theory of motivation class to query the large datasets generated by experiments that were done under a NASA human factors research grant to inform future long duration missions with Skylab, the Shuttle, and the ISS. I still have a copy of it in a binder of 132 column line printer paper and it would be hazardous to drop on your foot.
But who am I? I’ll start that with a link to my resume, as I had no real life apart from work until my wife and I connected and I’ll fill more details in later.
I put a lot of content into the Triangle Embedded Interest Group blog site during the past few years, but will be focusing on this site for personal reflections and a soon to be launched biz blog for my company, Apex Proto Factory, going forward. [Update: a new client has preempted almost all other spare moments and spiffing up the biz site might take a long, long time now. It’s hard having a full time client and three part time clients!!][Later update: less client load, but more personal responsibilities with family and friends. The biz blog plan is shelved for now.]