Other Stuff

1980's - While in college I volunteered for the Student Tutorial Elementary Program, which paired college students with low-performing youth from underprivileged neighborhood schools.  The one-on-one attention the child received twice a week for a semester made a demonstrable difference according to their teachers.

1980s – 2000’s - I found the tutoring experience so rewarding that after I graduated I spent the next 25 years as a “Big Brother” to two fatherless boys.

The second one recently had a baby and I was made Honorary Grandfather.

2003 – I spent a semester teaching English in China at the University level.

(I'm the one with the shaved head.)

I actually blogged about the experience while there. You can read the blog in its original form here (along with video and sound on some pages), or it's available in book form (well, .pdf file) here. (You won't believe the opening to Chapter 1!)

1989 - I wrote the music (and was musical director) for a children's play. Here's an excerpt - that's me playing piano in the background. Probably the most sophisticated music I've ever written.

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Two NASA videos (one from 1989)

This is me when I was young and good looking. A NASA video right around the time of Voyager's visit to Neptune. Back then, scientists got their spacecraft data from 8-track tapes and computer printouts. My group experimented with graphical displays on UNIX workstations which could visualize the data in real-time. I tried to graft that high-end capability to the measly IBM PC, which back then had the crappiest graphics ever.

And here's the longer video: "My Life As A Geek - My Decade at NASA and the Inventions that Got Me There", a lecture I gave in Copenhagen when I was there giving a seminar in 2012. Grab some popcorn and enjoy!

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Six Weeks

Since I'm on a nostalgia roll here, let me tell you about the most interesting six weeks of my life.  First, some background:  

In the early 1980's, I was a photographer for a children's sign language performing ensemble called "A Show Of Hands". The group toured Switzerland in 1985 and made intense friends there with members of a Swiss children's theatre group called A.F.A.T.

Three years later, I went on a similar photographic excursion to the Soviet Union, where I documented a cultural exchange between Latvian and American high school students.  

I've compiled a short 22-page picture book talking about six weeks in 1989 which brought these and many other significant experiences together.  They are:

• Trip to Switzerland to visit some of the kids from A.F.A.T.
• Trip to Germany to work at the European Space Agency
• The Peace Child Reunion in Detroit
• Voyager Neptune Encounter at JPL (that was a big deal back in the day)
• Moving into my first condo
• And more...

You can download the booklet here:

https://friedmanarchives.com/~download/temp/Six_Weeks.pdf

Be sure to look at the last two pages, showing a timeline of just how busy I used to be outside of work, and why my mom always complained that I was burning the candle at both ends in my 30's.

Enjoy!

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My MIT Application

 My oldest grandson and I were going through some of these old inventions, most of which were packed in a box in the basement.  One item in that box was a copy of my application to the MIT Media Lab.  I was hoping to attend graduate school there in the early 1990's.

I explained to him that the Media Lab was a different part of MIT; they were looking for students with a diverse background of interests, not just engineering.  Their feeling was that new discoveries happen when you apply knowledge from one field to solve a problem in another.  I put together this portfolio to show the vastly different skill sets I brought to the table.

He looked at the table of contents, which included my NASA experience, many inventions, publications, patents, awards, a book, photography and photojournalism, the fact that I wrote the music for a children's play, that I was an elementary school tutor in college and a 'Big Brother' for many years.  "Wow!", he said.  "So did you get in?"

He was incredulous when I told him they turned me down two years in a row.  "What on earth do you have to do to go there?  Get a Nobel Peace Prize?"  

I think I did him a disservice by sharing that story.  Now he probably thinks MIT is unattainable.

Here's the full portfolio: https://friedmanarchives.com/~download/blog/MIT%20Portfolio%20smaller.pdf

(More after the photo.)

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In going through this for the first time in 30 years, I noticed these "Works in Progress" ideas, many of which I completely forgot about.  (These are the kinds of ideas you capture before they evaporate if you have a Data Egg. 🙂 )

The Trustworthy Digital Camera ended up being patented.  The Enhanced Voice Recognition is a great idea that I never pursued.  The Adaptive Overhead Projector was never pursued yet is now a staple of every projector in existence (and of course I get no compensation).  And the Holographic Optical Element is still a great idea but smartphone capability has pretty much eclipsed the quality that it would have produced.  

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I started my own business...

I left my 10-year career at NASA because I wanted to commercialize some of my patents, and in order to do that I had to learn how to run a business.

The company I started was called E2 Solutions (E2 stood for "Extended Enterprise" - we were an Information Technology consulting firm which had visions of using the new internet to enable remote work from anywhere.)  Our claim to fame was being a "Systems Integrator" - we could hook up your PC, Mac, and Unix boxes on the same network and have them all talk to each other.  We sold computers and services to customers like the Army, Air Force, NASA, Dole (the pineapple company), just to name a few.

The company started with me and a telephone, and I grew it to 22 employees and $10M in revenues in just 3 years.  In five years it crashed and burned because our employee expenses kept going up but our revenues stayed flat - I blame the ineffectiveness of our sales staff.

I learned a lot, but it was a very stressful 5 years.  

After that I went to work for an internet-based insurance company during the dot-com boom.  Made a lot of money then lost a lot of money during the tech crash of 2000.  Tried to raise money to start a new company to commercialize one of my patents (using the Data Egg typing scheme and grafting it onto cell phones.  Texting was a new thing then and all people had to type with were numeric keypads.  You had to press a button 3 times just to get a "C"!!)  After 18 months I plowed through my life's savings.  Giving up, I said, "Screw it!" and went to China to teach English for a semester.

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