Being a venue of expression for self-avowed eccentric Jerry Marty, who in this preamble refers to himself in the third person, but mercifully reverts to the more familiar first person below the horizontal line...

I used to be antisocial, but that seems to have gone out of style. A few years ago I changed my policy to interact more with the natives of this planet, and that seems to have gone reasonably well. I am married to a wonderful woman named Laura Baldwin. Laura doesn't mention it on her web page, but she has Super Powers. I have some other great friends who have immortalized their lives in HTML: Mike Person, Marleigh Norton, Elizabeth Ditchburn-Dew, and other luminaries whose web pages are too widely spread for me to find them just now. I would include Eon's web page, but it's really a web shred that he put up one day several years ago and never updated, so I won't. In July 2004, Charles, Laura, and I bought a house in Somerville, Massachusetts.	One cannot survive by oxygen and caffeine alone. At least, I can't. Humor and wonder are other staples of the Fearless Food Pyramid. Remember the 1900's, when we were told that civilization would come to an end when computers hit the year 2000? I was an IT Manager at the time. Here is the y2k planning document I wrote. I like movies. Well, okay, not all of them. Elizabeth Ditchburn-Dew runs a Rolemaster campaign called Auria, which I play in every Tuesday night. Charles Hope, the Harvard Spy In Our Midst, runs "The Comet Returns" in his own home-brew system. The web page is not accessible, in order to protect it against Great Evil. My Thursday night game, Kulthea, is run by Derrick Kong. It's another rolemaster campaign, set in ICE's Shadow World universe. In Empire Of The Dragon, run by Laura Baldwin and Mike Person, I play the fabulous Zhu Cai Wen, a gambler and happy-go-lucky occasional hero. Go Butterfly Spirit! Down with Aku! My writing page
It's hard to let go of some of this stuff... I graduated from MIT in 1993, with a (now look carefully, I don't want to say this twice) Bachelor of Science in The Humanities. My actual area of study was Ancient and Medieval History. I was not, repeat not a hacker or any other no-good disruptive sort. Don't bother looking for my sign-in in any hard-to-get-at places around the Institute. But I've heard that some joker wrote "CA" in white-out on some walls, pipes, and ductwork. You could look for that. Almost nobody on earth knows what that stands for. For more details on this sort of thing, try the Gallery of Hacks page. Much of my spare time as an undergraduate was devoted to the Lecture Series Committee. When I was Lecture Director, Douglas Adams cancelled on thirty days' notice two terms in a row. But now he's dead and I live, so I figure I've won that particular private war. I also served as Chairman and Treasurer. The pinnacle of my night-directing career was Science Fiction Marathon XV, in IAP 1993. The MIT Assassins' Guild has a long, rich history of real-time real-space roleplaying. I had the pleasure of co-writing and running several of these games: Daria (with Kate Mahoney, 1992), Peace In Our Time (with Abbe Cohen, Brian Litofsky, Morris Matsa, Mike Person, and Mike Richters, 1996), Reign of Terror (with Nick Carter, Abbe Cohen, Derrick Kong, Jan-Willem Maessen, and Mike Richters, 1998), Derelict (with Laura Baldwin and Ryan Rifkin, 1999), and Conspiracy (with Jeremy Brown, Tom Giordano, Charles Hope, and Mike Person, 2004). I'm retired. Really. In Laura and Mahk's Tzalmir game, I played Marek Wrathblade, the Red Warrior of Shagras. If you look through the rumor mills, you'll see various in-character rants of mine. Laura and Mike had this great roleplaying campaign called Hippocratic Oath. They let me play the ship.	Plans change, but I still try to insist on keeping things interesting... I have been working at State Street Bank since November of 2003, in the Performance Assurance group. If you don't know what Performance Assurance means, that's OK; most people at State Street don't know either. We're the first line of defense against creeping problems that you don't know will crash your server next week, and we're one of the last lines of defense when your server is inexplicably hosed and you don't know what to do. I like this job, and I'm working with a good group of people. Update: In July 2011, State Street decided to outsource its infrastructure support, including me. Being a giant company, they will never realize what they're losing. Here's my resume. I have various home-improvement schemes on my todo list now that I have a house. In 2004, we tore down interior walls in our third floor to make a nice gaming/TV area. In 2006, we re-finished the stairway going to the third floor, and installed a bronze dragon to guard it. Now I'm replacing basement windows. Flowers for 2007: Petunias, Pansies, Mourning Glories, and Roses in the front, and Snapdragons, Zinnias, and Dahlias in the back. I planted one other perennial in the back, which has very dark ("chocolate") colored flowers, but I don't remember the name of the plant. Technically, we also have tulips back there, but some neighborhood critter seems to have decided that tulip buds are really tasty, so they've been topped for the last two years in a row. The obsession starting in 2010 has been Coleus, which comes in many beautiful varieties, can be grown from cuttings, and fills in open space very nicely.

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