Students and colleagues often ask how I came to live in Indonesia.
This page is for them...

I was born in Oakland, California, on March 22, 1967. Oakland is in the United States of America, of course, just across the bay from San Francisco, home of the beautiful Golden Gate Bridge. My family didn't stay there very long, however. We were gypsy kids, and we moved around a lot when I was a child.  There  were years spent in rustic coastal villages where we watched the gray whales pass in the fall, and in rugged mountain towns where we lived with no electricity or hot water, and walked over two miles in the snow to school every winter--which seems like a long way, when you're a little kid!

Eventually, we settled in the state of Oregon, just north of California, in a little town of 20,000 people called Ashland. Ashland is famous for the Oregon Shakespearean Festival Theater. (My mother came there because see was a stage actress and thought it might lead to work opportunities.) I went to junior high and high school there in the early 1980s. In junior high I took a computer programming class, and that was the start of an interest that continues to this day.

In high school, however, I was more interested in music. I tried rock guitar for a bit, but failed miserably. I was much better at classical guitar. Here's an embarrassing little bit of nostalgia  from those days.

Classical guitar is what took me to Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, after graduating at the top of my high school class in 1986. But once there, I was exposed to Indian classical music  and Javanese gamelan, and that was the start of big changes in my life. In 1988, I spent  a semester abroad in Indonesia with 25 other college students, and then went on to India for another 6 months on my own, where I studied sitar and tabla with Indian maestros in Delhi.

After a year in Asia, I returned to college, graduated in 1990, and went on for a Master's degree in music and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, not far from Chicago. I made more trips to Indonesia in 1990 and 1991 to study gamelan and Bahasa Indonesia.

In 1993 I was awarded a scholarship to do several years of research on traditional music in Indonesia. Strangely, this would be the last time I would see the United States. The longer I lived in Indonesia, the less happy I felt about returning  home to become a university professor. And so... I stayed.

I lived for six years in Solo, playing Javanese gamelan much of that time, and then teaching English to make ends meet. I was married there in 1996. However, in 1998 the Indonesian monetary crisis brought much hardship to Solo, and to me personally. I found a job in Bandung, and I left Solo with my former wife Dian. It was a good change. The air was cooler, and the city proved to be a bit more modern.

After a few years I joined The British Institute as an English teacher. However, I soon became involved in redesigning their computer network and developing the IT side of their curriculum. In 2002, after getting my network engineering certs and spending a year at TBI as Senior Teacher for Information Technology and defacto networking systems engineer, I joined KampungCyber, a local IT consulting company, as Senior Network Engineer.

I spent the next five years working to bring telecommunications access and IT awareness to disadvantaged communities in Indonesia. During that time I've also been associated with several big and small World Bank sponsored projects designed to enhance the Indonesian government's ability to utilize IT services for public benefit. However, one of KampungCyber's favorite success stories is the wireless ISP owned by the local government of Sumedang, West Java, but built and operated by our personnel. This is an excellent example of a public-private sector partnership being able to effect massive technological advancement in a rural area.

Turning to the more personal side of life, My Indonesian wife and I, after many years of struggling with differences of value (some culturally-based and others purely personal) opted for a divorce in January 2004. Perhaps not so coincidentally, I started playing guitar again later that same year. 2004 marks a period of major transformation and readjustments in my personal life which, while fascinating to me, would probably bore you to no end. Let's save it for another day, except to say that some great guitar transcriptions have come out of that period.

It's 2007 as of this writing and I'm still living in Indonesia, which I suspect will always be my real home. I'm recently married again, to the funny, intelligent, and sanguine Wenny Sesiana--whom I met (again) in 2005. I'm still doing computers, still playing guitar when I can, and still doing my part to contribute to IT-related education and services in Indonesia.