Randall A. Gordon

I am someone who looks at the world around me and sees many failings. However, I have decided to make a change in the way I deal with them. Instead of simply complaining about them, I have decided to start doing what I can to solve the problems I see. I wish to see improvements and enjoy knowing that my personal effect on the world is more positive than negative.

To give you a better idea of who is writing this I feel I need to convey just how varied I am. I grew up in a small town in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, which helped foster my desire for strong, well-bonded communities. I was raised by my family, not just my mother and father. Although I was technically an ‘only child’ I had cousins around often enough that they were treated as brothers and sisters. When my mother was working graveyard shifts and my step-father was away working construction contracts, I would stay with my grandparents, who were also my neighbors. Since they have passed, I now once again live in one of my childhood homes. A good portion of my family lives within ten miles of me. Small town ideals are certainly a part of who I am. I call upon how I was raised to provide a moral compass in my decisions.

Everyone in my family had different sets of skills to provide to me. My father was first and foremost a salesman, a great talker and a DJ. His love for people and music became ingrained in me. A favorite photo from my childhood shows me with his full-size headphones nearly engulfing my head. My step-father worked construction, drywall and framing mostly. So I was taught how to work with lumber and created a network of tree forts in my back yard. My grandfather worked wood in other ways; he was a logger and also did some wood carving and constructed small pieces of furniture. My grandmother was a painter and worked stained glass with my mother and grandfather. Their glass work always fascinated me and I intend to learn the craft once I get my workshop in order. My great grandfather on my grandmother’s side was an old school analog electronics wizard. Although I was never old enough for him to teach me directly before he passed, seeing the neat things he could do with his shortwave set and hearing about the water-wheel powered kitchen lamp he rigged for his mother when he was a young teen really sparked my interest in electronics.

My mother worked as a technician for Hewlett-Packard. She gave me the passion for which I hold the most affinity. She saw technology coming of age, so she ensured that I received plenty of exposure. The Atari 2600 was a family mainstay, then the original Nintendo NES and so-on… Everything changed when I received my first computer at the age of seven, a Tandy machine with a 286 processor and 40MB hard drive inside. It was less than a year before I discovered that MS-BASIC was hiding only a single command away at the familiar “C:\>” prompt of MS-DOS. A cousin of mine happened to be a computer programmer and gave me the software and books I needed to start working with a computer language called C. I was hooked on software programming. I had complete control over the computer and it had to do what I told it. Learning what happened when I pressed button A vs. B vs. C was the most fun I ever had in my young years. It formed my basis of problem solving and allows me to “debug life.”

It would be a few more years, but once I had a modem and an Internet connection I had access to more information than I could ever take in. I began using chat rooms and IM software to connect with others. I found new communities that I could contribute to. It allowed me access to a vast number of sources suggesting new hobbies to try. A look at the titles on my bookshelves is perhaps the most telling. You will find books on the subjects of computer programming, knot tying, metallurgy, jewelry making, stained glass and lampworking, wood working, photography, quantum physics and even knitting. I feel there is no skill or idea which is unworthy of learning. What I believe has helped me most is that I have dedicated my life to learning. Every day I try to learn something new. This has provided me with a vast amount of knowledge to utilize in my day to day tasks. I find that I rarely encounter a situation for which I don’t have some idea about where to start problem solving.

I hope to use my varied background to provide assistance to the world in the form of information. I encourage everyone to occasionally pick a topic which is completely foreign to them and learn about it. Type a word you’ve never seen before into Google. Grab a dictionary and open it to a random page. Reach your hand out in the library and start reading the first book your hand touches. If nothing else, it will give you something to talk about; “Hey did you know that…”