Despite the charisma, genteel urbanity, charm, eternal youthfulness, rugged athleticism, and
intellectual prowess that should have, by now, guaranteed Bob endless flights in private jets, a
long string of successful marriages to movie actresses, and unimaginable wealth, Bob currently
toils away the few, pitiable remaining years of his life as a patent attorney. Once a scuba diver,
rock climber, white-water kayaker, pilot, mountain climber, and skydiver, Bob is now a broken,
near-sighted, bifocal-clad, and meek shadow of his former dynamic self, tirelessly working, often
past midnight, hunched over his computer in a tiny, dark office, bathed in the bluish glow of the
display screen, in order to support his beautiful, although somewhat demanding, wife and
handler Aileen (a.k.a. "Pea," "Sweet Pea," and "Ling"), and, formerly, his now adult children
Trevor (a.k.a. "the Big T" and "Tiny T"), Kirana (a.k.a. "Key,"" the Kiranasaurous," and "Kiki"),
and Benny (a.k.a. "Baby Wadoo," "Little B," "Wheedle").
A former resident of Spokane, where he marveled at "bat-wing" fighters taking off from
Fairchild air-force base, Othello, where he reanimated frozen lizards and watched diesel trains
pounding into town along the feet of the Saddle Mountains, Royal Camp, where he gained
expertise in building and operating slingshots fashioned from coat hangers and rubber bands, and
Olympia, from where he traveled to Seattle in 1966 to see the Beatles live, and where he first
heard the music of Big Brother and the Holding Company, Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane,
and Country Joe and the Fish on a small, vacuum-tube radio, Bob graduated from Olympia High
School in 1971. Bob initially rejected the notion of higher education, purchased a used VW bug
using the proceeds of three years of work in hospital kitchens, public libraries, and various lawns
and yards, and drove off into the wide world. In a campground along the Oregon coast, Bob met
a group of freewheeling, long-haired travelers. Fascinated with their tales of hitchhiking in
distant lands, he sold the VW bug and embarked on a year-long series of adventures, hitchhiking
about North America, Europe, and Egypt. Bob ended up, the following summer, living in a trash-
filled basement along Mud Bay and working for the State of Washington. Considering his
humble circumstances one summer afternoon, walking out from the dark basement past
odiferous piles of crab and horse-clam shells, remnants of foraging expeditions along Mud Bay
and Harstine Island, he decided to enroll at the University of Washington. Bob spent 5 years at
UW, from 1972-1977, studying Russian language and literature, chemistry, biochemistry,
mathematics, and biology, supporting himself by working in cedar shake mills on the Olympic
Peninsula during the summers and with various work-study jobs on campus. He earned a BA in
Russian and a BS in biology (molecular and cellular biology).
Graduating into a grim employment market, after a single, and remarkably unsuccessful, job
interview with the CIA in 1977, Bob found himself back in the cedar shake mills during the
remainder of 1977 and the spring of 1978, living in various locations, including a tent at the side
of a mill dump, an unpowered and unplumbed trailer filled with nocturnal, acrobatic mice, and
under the Highway 101 bridge at Amanda Park. Retaining all ten fingers and his limbs, he
returned to university life in 1978 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, concurrently
earning an MS in computer science, a PhD in biochemistry, with research in x-ray
crystallography, a private pilot's license, and a class D skydiving license. Bob fondly recalls
often spending 24-36 hours non-stop programming on a PDP-11/70 in the basement of the
computer science building in Madison, only to drag himself back to the biochemistry building to
resume an endless, and generally fruitless, search for crystallized macromolecules that represent
the starting point for x-ray diffraction studies that eventually lead to molecular structures. Finally
completing his MS in May of 1983, Bob hurried to finish his PhD thesis in the late fall of 1983
as the weather grew colder and he grew increasingly less content to live in a small tent,
surrounded by corn fields, at the side of a rural airstrip, and frequently sleeping in his skydiving
club's Cessna 182 when the local authorities, occasionally wielding shotguns, were in the mood
for late-night assaults on Bob's humble encampment.
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1983, Bob worked for many years in the
computer and software industries as a software engineer in the areas of operating systems
development, hierarchical, relational, and object-oriented database development, interpreters,
networking, and applications development. Around October 16, 1989, while in Indonesia, Bob
met his future wife Aileen, and after a long, romance-filled, 4-day courtship, and an extensive
10-day engagement, Bob and Aileen were married on October 31st without realizing that, while
any other day in Indonesia, it was Halloween back home, in the USA. Tired of dead-end
engineering jobs, and burdened with the financial realities attendant with a growing family, Bob
decided to yet again enroll in a university. While working as a software engineer in Silicon
Valley to support a growing family, Bob obtained a JD from the University of California at
Berkeley in 1995. Since then, Bob has worked as a patent attorney, occasionally moonlighting as
an engineer, preparing and prosecuting patent applications in the areas of computer software,
hardware, and architecture, including machine learning and artificial intelligence, data analytics,
compilers, operating systems, databases, virtual monitors, mathematical applications, and various
other complex software and hardware technologies, bioinformatics and computational biology,
quantum computing, information science, molecular-array technologies, biochemistry,
chemistry, electronics, semiconductor fabrication, applied mathematics, nanotechnology,
molecular electronics, fuel cells, complex, computer-controlled mechanical systems, microscopy,
optics, and other such things. Bob has used his Russian-language background to communicate
and exchange scientific and technical information with Russian clients.
Unfortunately, Bob has had to courageously struggle, during his entire professional career, with
severe addictions to chocolate, black licorice, sunflower seeds, and lattes. Although not yet
having gained an upper hand over these tragic substance-abuse problems, Bob is ever hopeful
that this evil will eventually depart and plague him no further. Perhaps the single point mutation
responsible for the combined chocolate/licorice/sunflower-seed/latte addiction will soon be
identified, leading to a dramatic cure.
Bob loves his job, enjoys working on challenging scientific and technical problems, is grateful
for having had the fortune to work with so many wonderfully creative, intelligent, and good-
natured inventors and in-house attorneys, continues to relentlessly study math and science, and
even continues to program. Bob is indebted to Joanne Bourguignon and his many great clients,
including in-house counsels and many prominent technologists, scientists, mathematicians, and
engineers. Bob recognizes that he, like most people, is the product of many years of careful
instruction and training, and Bob has had the great fortune to have learned from a large number
of mentors, teachers, and colleagues for whom he feels lifelong gratitude, including, in addition
to his wife Aileen:
Mr. Walter Bergstrom
Mrs. Alice Bergstrom
Mrs. Laura Turner
Mrs. Hale
Mr. Shipley
Mr. Fletcher
Mrs. Carlye LaBell
Mr. Dave Ensberg
Mrs. Nora Holdsworth
Dr. P. V. Gribanovsky
Dr. Roger Hagglund
Dr. Sundaralingam
Dr. S.T. Rao
Dr. Larry Dahl
Dr. Marion Greaser
Dr. Tuli Haromy
Dr. Ken Satyshur
Dr. Gale Strasburg
Dr. Bill Drendel
Prof. Willy Fletcher
Professor Paul Rubin
Mrs. Lucille West
Ed Wood
Steve Harman
Marshall Wells
Barry Herring
Jerry Melnick
Dave Schrader
Raman Chellia
Dr. Ramesh Anishetty
Dr. Rebecca Aft
Dr. Richard Bell
Tim Johns
Steve Schurkey
Barabara Kroczak
Mark Meredith
Vic Thompson
Duffy Williams
Lora Verkhovsy
Boris Burshteyn
Dr. Vladimir Brayman
Elna Benoit
Jim Clark
Pat Meriwether
Peter Dolliver
Rafael Lisitsa
Richard Richings
Dave Plettner
Clare Hartnett
Denise Saffold
Laurie Mintz
Bob's Favorite Things:
family
friends
Lilly and Shipley dogs
Fred and Zelda cats
backpacking and climbing
flying
skydiving
scuba diving
white-water kayaking
reading math and science
Mikhail Bulgakov
Lev Tolstoy
J.S. Bach
Mozart
Prokofiev
Handel
Strauss
Mendelssohn
Chopin
George Gershwin
Fred Astaire
Glenn Miller
Bunny Berigan
Harry James
Duke Ellington
Count Basie
Benny Goodman
Ella Fitzgerald
Sarah Vaughn
Louie Jordan
The Beatles
The Rolling Stones
Jefferson Airplane
The Kinks
The Grateful Dead
Bob Dylan
Mike Bloomfield
Smokey Robinson
Big Bro & Holding Company
Country Joe and the Fish
Santana
Sly and the Family Stone
The Byrds
Simon & Garfunkel
Flying Burrito Brother
Gram Parsons
Mahavishnu Orchestra
Elvin Bishop
Crosby, Stills, Nash
Herman's Hermits
Hot Club of Cowtown
Frankie Lymon
Chris Hillman /Desert Rose
The Spaniels
Big Bad Voodoo Daddy
Traffic
Peter & Gordon
Casablanca
Amadeus
Year of Living Dangerously
Master & Margarita (2005)
Kin Dza Dza
Bagdad Cafe
Man Facing Southeast
Clockwork Orange
Swing Time
Where the Wild Things Are
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Jean de Florette
reading Russian literature
trees and flowers
symmetry
pomegranates
rotary-dial telephones
slide rules
textbooks
vacuum tube radios
the beast (Honda VTX-1800)
The Secret Beach
Vasilii Grossman
Mark Twain
Billy Holiday
Nat King Cole
Jimmy Durante
Artie Shaw
Dean Martin
Rosemary Clooney
Bing Crosby
Louis Prima & Keely Smith
Johnny Mathis
Cab Calloway
Doris Day
Helen Ward
Bobby Darrin
Bea Wain
Larry Clinton
Kitty Kallen
Woody Herman
Bobby Darrin
Elvis Presley
Asleep at the Wheel
Arlo Guthrie
Peter Paul and Mary
Hot Tuna
Frank Zappa
The Doors
Rick Nelson
Lovin' Spoonful
Simon and Garfunkel
Mamas and Papas
5th Dimension
Chambers Brothers
The Marcels
Jr. Walker
Stevie Wonder
Mobey Grape
Paul Butterfield
Electric Flag
Chad & Jeremy
The Platters
The Contours
Emmylou Harris
Danny and the Juniors
Brian Seltzer
Hollies
James Taylor
Fargo
Quiet Flows the Don
Ballad of a Soldier
17 Moments of Spring
Dr. Zhivago (2009)
Heart of a Dog (1988)
Shall We Dance (Japanese)
Blade Runner
Maltese Falcon
Top Hat
Superman I
Manon of the Spring
The Olympic Mountains
The North Cascades
Mt. Rainier
Arches
The Grand Canyon
Methow Valley
Nusa Lombongen
Arroyo Seco in Los Padres
Olympic Wilderness Beaches
The Lost Coast
James Thurber
Dr. Seuss
Dinah Washington
Judy Garland
Cab Calloway
Louis Armstrong
Perry Como
Blossom Dearie
Dorsey Brothers
Andrews Sisters
Lena Horne
Peggy Lee
Julie London
Jimmie Lunceford
Edith Piaf
Nina Simone
Helen Forrest
Perry Como
Dinah Shore
War
Los Lobos
Indigo Swing
Dell Vikings
Poco
Ten Years After
Quicksilver
The Band
The Animals
Cream
Jimi Hendrix
Donovan
Youngbloods
Bill Haley & the Comets
Mitch Ryder / Detroit Wheels
Maria Muldaur
John Mayall
Buffalo Springfield
Dan Hicks / Hot Licks
Georgie Fame
The Moonglows
The Flamingos
Bobby Lewis
Maurice Williams & Zodiacs
Stray Cats
Jethro Tull
Judy Collins
If I Had a Million
To Have and Have Not
The Gay Divorce
The Cranes Are Flying
Follow the Fleet
Animal House
Office Romance
A Room with a View
Shall We Dance
It's a Gift
Bank Dick
Mimino