Dan Keller's Perpetually - Under - Construction Home Page...

First: NO WAR! detail from Picasso's Guernica

in Iraq or Palestine or Darfur or anywhere else and I'm building NursesGetItDone,

an iPhone app for nurses that, in the spirit of

Atul Gawande's healthcare quality revolution will change Nurse Ratched

how nurses work,

daughter Cara is launching ArtSpace4500, in July 2011

Alexi has joined the Finnish army, and in 2008 we moved to

Rome for a year where we had a lot of water but the Romans don't worry until it reaches the

occhialone (big eye) di Ponte Sisto and if you're tempted to curse the mediocrity of American pop culture just listen to

Gattino Virgola ringtones that blessedly are not on the cellphones of my teenage kids propeller hat

who in 2008 attended St. Stephen's and some of those meetings did seem to last 37 years (click this link to see a great photo caption) but my kids do love

sushi which I tell them to enjoy before the oceans are lifeless

(could theirs be the last generation to eat wild-caught fish?), for 22 years had a business making a living

-- we pioneered

the paperless classroom -- and I am a newly-licensed RN with

a healthcare blog and in December, 2010 was "pinned" (how nurses celebrate graduation) at (click us!)

SMU (a vocational school) where I learned that the

kidneys (not the brain) run the show and we must remedy the mediocrity of

post-secondary education (the good news is that we can fix it), celebrate

Lisa Engelken's Best (jazz) of 2010 award,

rant endlessly, wrote my first program on an

IBM 360 in Fortran taught to me by

Neil MacFarlane, got a master's degree in

Medical Information Science (here are some reminiscences)

from

UCSF where I was privileged to be advised by Dr. Marsden Scott Blois, a pioneer in

medical concept representation and collected a few autographs of computing giants but let's be careful not to

unleash a monster though I once had

a tricycle and later an

answering machine, have been thinking about business and real estate in Italy and my latest client

Dolce Trastevere, and I did create

Wifi-Italia and Italy's first free public Wifi site

(former Italian president President Cossiga

Cossiga repeatedly pumped my hand, extolling wireless technology -- he's got three wifis in his house) -- and here's my house (it has only two)

and custom-built Sun Frost appliances

(yes, that's my kitchen on their web site) and was featured on

the cover of the Oct. 2004 SF Apartment magazine and was the set for one episode of a short-lived TV series named Loni Anderson and Lynda Carter

Partners in Crime (1984) starring Lynda Carter and Loni Anderson and

Google StreetView caught me there -- in the Castro district

(technically, Eureka Valley

but few call it that) of

San Francisco,

a town with a recent great mayor Mayor Gavin Newsom and a well-wisher

(Gavin, we miss you already!) and an enlightened public health policy (though we do have

earthquakes), and in a state

whose economy is the world's eighth-largest (Italy's is seventh; Brazil's is ninth), but my favorite home was for two years the MSO Lucid MSO-458 Lucid

(a surplused Korea-vintage Navy minesweeper), an adult

in the white house, intend to join or build

a cohousing community, and am fond of technology

but people are even more interesting so I have volunteered at the

UCSF Medical Center (Long Hospital and medical records), at the

SF General Hospital Emergency Room, at the Glide celebrates!

Glide Memorial clinic, at the

CPMC hospital Emergency Room, and at the

SF AIDS/HIV/HepC Nightline (phone staffing), and at the Tobacco Education Center The smoker's lungs and heart are the ones on the left, obviously.

and have run smoking cessation programs at

Kaiser sites in the Bay Area and at

Mills-Peninsula -- read the interview and

a classic denial story) and am now Factotum-in-Chief for

Gary Heit's Americare Neurosurgery International delivering equipment, training, and high-tech medical care

to the third world (went in March, 2008, to Hue, Vietnam) and see that

in California our hospitals themselves need life support grab yer own, creep

where Governor Boobengrabber picked the wrong fight when he said he was nursie

"Kicking our nurses' butts" (for this bad Governor healthcare for the insurance companies' bottom lines is the only healthcare that matters), had a father

who was a painter and politico

and who did

the artwork for this website and for

my company's training manuals (losing him in 2006 made a tough year even tougher), have a mother who is a filmmaker and playwright I don't take a pink one and a yellow one.

I don't take a pink one and a yellow one.

(here is a trailer on

YouTube who wrote the story of Taxi, the ferry-house dog) and had a recent huge success with her play

Funny Feeling (that's her granddaughter Cara in the poster), have a sister Marthe at the Met

Martheeenia -- who is (also) a great artist with a painting in New York's Metropolitan Museum Pliable Monster IV

and her husband

Brad who is a designer for

Estee Lauder and makes juice, another sister who traveled the world as the physical therapist for the New York City Ballet

dancer perfecting her turnout with Functional Footprints

and still fixes broken violinists at the Juilliard School and invents machines to make dancers better Functional Footprints

and is married to Colter

Colter the Voiceover King and my grandfather Sidney (my middle name) invented the Keller machine

and the process (called, oddly enough, Kellering) for creating dies to cast curved steel surfaces (that made possible

streamlined cars) whereas my other grandfather

(Herman Herschkowitz, renamed himself Harry Herman at Ellis Island) came to America on Nov. 18, 1906, aboard the

S.S. Amerika, have an apocalyptic vision of inevitable and catastrophic environmental collapse our tiny, delicate, precious planet

(even the Pentagon knows we're screwed... we're headed for a long emergency ("America's oil consumption is the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world... Suburbia is going to fail. You can state that categorically..." says

James Kunstler (one of my gurus) in America's New Religion) and we're about to be blindsided by

peak oil but here's

a glimmer of optimism) and Michael Stocker

and Ocean Conservation Research are doing something about the noisy oceans, have done projects for Silicon Valley companies including Agilent Technologies

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

and

, and have had a few

business cards along the way, rely utterly on an antique but marvelous piece of engineering --

HP's 200LX palmtop PC (it runs

DOS!), I still write HTML

by hand, spend too much time administering my network and a few dozen web sites (here's a neat dead link finder), it's amazing what people search for

in my search engine, memorialized

Bruce Borcherdt's Midas Niggard, have had my share of "customers from hell" Duh!

but, thankfully, none quite like the infamous Thrasher Thrasher works himself into a frenzy

, had a

tour of the Artificial Intelligence Lab and robotics workshops of MIT from my boyhood pal

Devon McCullough and once patted a Lisp Machine

, once acted in a movie

, just discovered that pretty much everything I know

(e.g. what is

spam -- really! check it out!) has been collected in a single, succinct document -- yes!

an IETF RFC! (by the way,

Death2Spam provides the best spam filtering I've seen) -- and in California (which has much

in common with

Italy) I have a Maas Aero Stroke! Stroke!

that I row at the splendid

Bair Island Aquatic Center but in Rome I rowed a

Donoratico Tre -- I like adventure sports

-- diving, parachuting, etc. (here's

parasailing in Mexico), cat in microwave (ok, not funny)

had a cat and Roman friends (Leo and Marilena) who are devoted

cat people, and here are links to my elementary school (The American Overseas School) AOSR

and (we visited in June, 2007) my high school (St. Stephen's School) SSS

in Rome (where I grew up -- here's a Rome website maintained by Stuardt Clarke), go back every year (here are pix from May, 2005) and in 2008-2009 actually returned to

Rome for a year and my kids attended St. Stephen's too!, have friends Lisa and Tom who run the beautiful Italophillic web site

Your Garden Show, have Roman friends who run the best ISP in Italy, Agora Telematica Agora logo

, a quasi-Roman friend, Graeme Thomas, who won awards for his stupendous web site

Kubrick 2001, The Space Odyssey Explained

(some great

Flash) and of course you recognize this line Hal 9000

, and now he's made the official

International Year of the Potato web site (in five languages!) and here's another adoptive-Roman friend, Catherine

who received an MBE from this emissary

of the Queen of England for her superb work running the

Keats-Shelley House, and regarding things Italian Alberto Sordi demonstrating spaghetti

do your gift shopping for limoncello

from John and Victoria's La Raccolta about which

tech guru Phil Glatz has waxed ecstatic or a silk scarf

from my Italophillic pal Lisa P. or a limoncello cake from Jan's

J.Marie Fine Cakes or take an eye-popping

tour of the secret gardens of Italy from my Italophillic pal Lisa F., and my pal

Ken Jacobs knows who killed JFK, and what about my oddball friend Gail Gail's URL GURL license plate

the webmistress (eh?), and here's Hotel Arenula

where I stay in Rome, on a recent visit to Italy I discovered hilarious, spunky

Luciana Littizzetto, (and if you really like spunky, be hip to in-your-face Afropuff

Aya de Leon), and there is San Francisco fixture

Chicken John who never fails to crack me up, worked for a time at the alas now-defunct

Colex Electronic Company Limited, 15th Floor, Luk Hop Industrial Building, 8 Luk Hop Street, San Po Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong

Colex Electronic Company Limited, 15th Floor, Murray and Dan in Hong Kong

Luk Hop Industrial Building, 8 Luk Hop Street, San Po Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong,

manufacturer of what was then (1983) the world's cheapest Unix machine (and the price was low, too :-) dubbed "poxy box" by

James Hole (it crashed when you typed cat), and here's Fritz Schaerli

, the president of Adasoft AG

makers of zutrittskontrollsisteme in Switzerland where I also enjoyed working long ago, once modeled the "...sleek, European-style monitor arm" in the Inmac catalog

(the Sun workstation screen is turned to hide the error messages), listened to Frank Zappa Frank w/ guitar

and Firesign Theatre, attended the defunct Notre Dame International

high school in Rome with buddy Bill Zimmerman, went to college at UCSC

UCSC -- here's

graduation with roommate Nic Nelken who today is a vascular surgeon at

Kaiser -- have always been fascinated by electronic music starting with Alvin Curran's in Rome in the 60's then studied with Gordon Mumma

(who introduced me both musically and personally to John Cage and others) at UCSC in the 70's and in 1977 at Dartmouth Baker Tower

with one of the inventors of the

Synclavier -- Jon Appleton

(with Moog and Syntrophia hat, with prototype Synclavier in road cases in San Francisco for a performance at the Exploratorium

) and at Stanford with John Chowning and in 1982 built my first studio with my then-roommate and techno-wild-man Mr. Etant-Donnes

Michael Schippling, played jazz in grad school), mourn for gifted pianist, best-chart-maker, and inspired software geek

Peter Eden whom we lost in the Fall of 2011, for adored drummer

Bruce Felter (with whom the pocket was so deep we delighted in calling it a trench) who passed on 12/20/2007, and the 7/7/7 loss of beloved friend and mentor

Joe Podolsky, the Nov. 2000 loss of Larry Morehead

the real estate mogul (funny story: unbeknownst to either of us at the time, the first building I bought was the first he sold), and another loss -- on 12/22/2002 my JazzCampWest

JazzCamp buddy Robin Gilbert

passed away, and that year we also lost pianist/artist Kent Holloway Kent Holloway, circa 1980

, and in early 2004 so too passed away my beloved ex-father-in-law Lauri Hieta (I was once married to a Finn; here are happy Hietas

photos from a happy time), and on 4/14/2004 we lost

Gosina Mandersloot, and shortly thereafter we lost Nameers fat cat

, and in 2005 was the passing of

Joe Bithell with whose

Silicon Gulch Jazz Band I enjoyed decades of gigs (no kidding!), and on 12/23/2005 we lost the extraordinary trumpet player and lifelong friend

Robin Hodes, in 2007 we lost drummer and beloved friend

Ben Randall, in 2011 we lost 'bone-player

Tom Small, and also in 2011 (July) we lost another cherished American Italian transplant and high school chum,

Lisa Marini Finerty, and I'll forever miss my best high school pal, brilliant student and energy engineer Mike Selig

who passed away on Feb 22, 2011 -- his last essay was his own obituary -- and here is

the grave of John Piccoli (in the Cimitero Acattolico, managed in part by Heather

but mostly by

Mandy and where I myself hope to be memorialized... not soon...) who died in 1955 at age 16 on his brand-new motorbike given to him that very day by his doting father Nemo the sculptor (Juanita never forgave him and left me her house but connivers screwed me out of it), so I have been thinking about death lately, hang onto old friends -- remember shmoos? shmoo

-- went to Thailand in 2006 to see the

longneck ladies (and my friend

Jason who wrote a succinct statement of his political values) -- used to go every year to Carnaval Dancing in the streets of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil!

in Salvador (capital city of the Brazilian state of Bahia, the

musical soul of that most musical country), adore the singing of Gal Costa

Brazil's top star (terrible politics,

terrible hair, but fabulous pipes, phrasing, time, arrangements, production, repertory, and sidemen -- isn't that what counts? ...oh yes, another deity in my pantheon is

Ray Brown -- it's said that when he was married to

Ella Fitzgerald and they had a fight she threw his bass into the pool -- but that's not why I worship him), for three years (2000-2003) made jazz acoustic bass my primary career

often as a sideman for Dan loves working with singers

singers (here's my musical resume and my

gig calendar

), made some hear my music!

MP3 sound clips (in my own little studio) of people I worked with such as

Mal Sharpe's Big Money in Jazz

Big Money in Dixieland, especially enjoyed playing with

Cathy Withacee Felter and My Trio, have compiled what, despite its relentless and interminable loquacity (and brutality toward viola

violists -- I dated one once; I should know) is probably not the definitive collection of

musician jokes, in 2004 moved on to my third career (career not job -- important distinction), have gotten interested in

wireless networks with

, am, with my family, active in our local community (here's us scrubbing the sidewalks

in our neighborhood paper), former volunteer-webmaster for CDS

Children's Day School that Cara used to attend, visited

my New York family in Spring, 2002, again in July of 2004, and again in Baby Colter, a mild little fellow...

December of 2005, and the glorious Fourth in Alameda, and I must warn you that

terrible things happen when you turn 50, in 2004 and

2007 strolled the

Bay-to-Breakers, in 2007 threw a

party for Susan, occasionally cook Nell's pot roast, couscous, spaghetti al tonno al modo di Leo,

pasta bianca al forno al modo di Marilena, and

Singapore noodles, and am reminded by WTC exploding

the World Trade Center attack to attend to

disaster preparedness (my ham callsign is KG6OIE) and, accordingly, have been

programming my radios -- if you live in the SF Bay Area, you may find useful my collection of local public agencies frequencies and SFPD

police codes (in a crisis, know what's going on!) and Cara and I took the

Neighborhood Emergency Response Team training, and I'm so relieved we got rid of

(click for rant)

Fuehrer Bush and finally elected an adult

though I didn't burn my draft card

(ok, enough ranting...

ahh, to protest in style like the Italians!), am converting my house to renewable energy anemometer collects data for planning wind generator

(solar and wind), love to visit

our friend Helmut's ranch, in 2004

Arky is into basketball and in 2006 he is into soccer

and in 2003 he joined me on a

mind-boggling (and strenuous) sea-kayaking trip in Baja, recently swapped apartments with

Eric Richmond, my buddy from third grade (his is in London where I saw my forever pal Amedeo

who takes pictures of Roma

and whose company Raceco makes high-tech motorcycles), and also from third grade there's

Johnny Bruckman (funny... he doesn't look like a third grader... :-) whose Dad changed my life by showing us kids on Johnny's birthday

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (in their private screening room, no less!) and I became the tough, silent loner (hah!), love to visit

Rick Ackerly's ranch in Mendocino County's Anderson Valley (the new Napa Valley), and traveling farther afield are Jeff Johnson (keeper of the progressive Peace Pundit) and Karen Ande and her superb, poignant

photos of orphans in AIDS-torn Kenya, occasionally do

silly little computer art thingies, in 2007 I finally went to

Burning Man (and played in the Burning Band) and vow to someday show it to my kids (who will be astounded... as was I...), and I fervently oppose capital punishment -- barbaric! (essay by my friend and mentor