About Kevin
I'm an electrical engineer (BSEE '92, MSEE '94) and have lived in Cincinnati, Houston, and Madison (WI) before moving to our current home in Austin, Texas.Madison and Austin are tied for my favorite places to live. Both are progressive cities with a high quality of life. Madison has fewer opportunities for technologists and a much smaller music scene, but it also lacks the sprawl and congestion that's overwhelming Austin. And it's cold there. Brrrrr.
I've had a lifelong interest in both music and electronics. In graduate school I pursued those interests by studying electroacoustics and signal processing (and was fortunate enough to have a really great advisor, Richard "Doc" Greiner). I've played a number of musical instruments but can't say I excelled at any of them. I still enjoy listening to music, both recorded and live, and the experience of learning to play has made me more appreciative of the effort, dedication, and talent it takes to be a musician.
In December 1999 I proposed to my then-girlfriend Kay. We were married in April 2001 in a wonderful ceremony in nearby Bastrop State Park.
My first job after college was designing firmware for audio noise cancellation with a (now defunct) company named Digisonix. In 1996 I moved to Austin to take a position with a 15-person IC design company named Oasis Design. At Oasis I worked on many different things, including embedded software, audio signal processing, digital IC design and verification, production test, and information technology. They grew to about 70 people in the USA and merged with a similarly sized company in Germany. In early 2005, the combined companies were acquired by SMSC.
SMSC appeared to be a well run company and a good place to work, but my heart wasn't in it anymore. In October 2005 I left to research opportunities in alternative energy and worked on an educational web site focused on thermal energy and researched the marketability of an improved solar thermal energy controller.
Kay and I started a small business named Green Hills Arts in late 2007. I mainly focus on the technical aspects of glasswork and the financial aspects of running a small business, or as we often say, the Tools, Techniques, Temperatures, and Taxes. You can read more about this on the About Us page on the Green Hills Arts web site.
I recently accepted an engineering position with Advanced Micro Devices. I'm looking forward to starting on August 17 and will add more details after I start.
In my spare time you will usually find me with a do-it-yourself project involving the house or cars, with Kay on a park trail or in a kayak, riding my motorcycle in the Texas hill country, tinkering with computers, or researching things on the web just for the joy of learning. One of my favorite things to do is to travel and explore someplace new; our photo albums will show some of these trips.