After graduating from AHS, I went to NMSU -- for 10 years. I started in their music program and got two degrees -- Bachelor's and Master's in Music Theory and Composition. I'd taken electives in psychology the whole time, so I stayed another semester and a summer to get a Bachelor's in Psychology, then stayed for a Master's in Engineering Psychology. That got me a job at IBM in Boca Raton, FL, as a Human Factors Engineer in 1981, and I've been there ever since, closing in on 30 years. My 30th anniversary with them will be April Fool's Day, 2011. For a profile on psychological scientists in the private sector published in 2001, see:

Voicing Psychology at Big Blue

For fun, I've dabbled in martial arts since college, and have been with the same taekwondo club in Boca Raton since I came to Florida in 1981. Michael is a 3rd degree black belt; Patrick is a 4th, and I'm closing in on 5th degree. To see Patrick do a blindfolded jump spin hook kick through a board and Mike to do a spin hook kick speed break, check out Youtube at:

Patrick and Mike Board Breaks

Most recently, I've started working on a couple of books. Practical Speech User Interface Design just came out December 15, 2010 (see picture below), and I'm working with Jeff Sauro (see www.measuringu.com) on Practical Statistics for User Research (probably out some time in 2012).

Practical Speech User Interface Design

Left IBM in 2019 and joined MeasuringU in 2020 (still working there as of 2025 -- see our blog articles at https://measuringu.com/blogs/). Inducted as a 6th degree master instructor in the American Taekwondo Association in 2020 and in the Florida Academy of Science, Engineering, and Medicine in 2021.

I remember taking part in an inter-mural FORTRAN programming competition, along with several of my closest friends from high school (Pat Steele, Jack Sprague, Randy Huddleston). They did great, but no matter what I did, I couldn't get any of my programs to run, so I just went downstairs and played pinball, and decided that whatever I did with my life, it would have nothing to do with computers.