The Early Years

	My loving parents

Doug, the product of a forbidden love between his father (a chimpanzee) and mother (a cat) was born in the sleepy midwestern town of Norway, Illinois. Doug achieved fame immediately upon his birth, having been deemed by the Guiness Book of world records to be the world's first luminescent baby; he also appeared on the cover of Time Magazine for tapping out the secret herbs and spices for Kentucky Fried Chicken in morse code in his hospital crib...

Chances are that if you've found your way to this page you already know who I am (Doug Mandell) and where I come from (Chicago). I could try to continue on with an elaborately fabricated history of Doug, but I'm not a writer and I think one paragraph is probably enough to spend on that excercise.

So here's my plan, I figure my time is best spent catching you up on what I do now, what I enjoy doing, and introducing you to some of my closer friends. If you're not in the links I provide here, drop me a line and I'll add you, assuming of course I don't hate your guts. So....here we go:

Post Sullivan High

After I graduated from Sullivan High School I moved out to Portland to attend Reed College. Reed isn't much of a school in terms of athletics (I started on the school soccer team my freshman year, and the only other sports they have are men's basketball and women's rugby). There's also an end of the year softball tournament, which I've played in every year since '96. I've reached the finals once and the three times, but never grabbed that brass ring. I've assembled a team again this year, this time we'll have matching shirts and HATS...we'll kick ass. I'll post pictures after the tourney (end of April). In order to further satisfy my softball jones I'll be playing for a local Portland softball league, if I don't embarass myself too badly I'll have photos from that as well.

	A 1997 bike trip around Michigan with camp. I never led one of these as an HA

I met some really great people at Reed, as well as some real dumbasses... I'll introduce you to the cool people a little later, the dumbasses are best left unmentioned. At any rate, Reed was a great experience, one I wouldn't trade in for anything, no matter how difficult it might have been. Two of the three years I lived on campus I was a House Advisor, which is the Reed equivalent of an RA. As an HA I didn't have to act as a cop, I was there to be a resource and a mediator, and basically got to act as a camp counselor (minus the excercise). I really enjoyed the job, and by and large my friends from Reed were people I HA'd. One exception would be my friend Dylan, who I think I met playing soccer (I don't know how else I would have known him... maybe through a mutual friend or something), and my friend Brian (who I met through Dylan). Anyhow, we ended up being HAs at the same time for a couple of years, but we all share a mutual respect for pinball and football (well, maybe not so much respect from Brian as from Dylan), and at Reed that sets you apart. Currently Dylan trains people how to give technical support to truckers, no easy task. Brian does computer stuff for a company that has something to do with dentistry.

After Reed I lived with my friend Paul and went to work for a tech support company, which very nearly killed me. I've got lots of tech support horror stories, but they're the usual "angry person hates my guts" stories you can find from tech support people all over the internet, suffice it to say it was a really hard time and I was glad when I was able to get away. Paul left his job to go work as a lawyer, and his company (first called Creative Multimedia, then Ledge Multimedia, and at that time called Dataware Technologies) decided to hire me on to replace him as the local network administrator. It was a BIG step up, a great job, nice office, good people, I had a lot of fun there.

Post Tech Support

	Charles and Sean building a CATAPULT in our garage. I didn't stick around to watch them fire it.

So I was hired on in August of 1999 as the new network administrator, at about the same time I moved into a house with four of my friends, Neil, Jonah, Charles, and Keith (who was later replaced by Sean when he moved out...Sean's a cool guy too). The house has its own website, you should check it out if you have a moment. Because I currently live with all of these guys I think they deserve a little blurb: Neil lived in both of the dorms I HA'd, has a father who was formerly VP of Sun Microsystems, and his turn-ons include long walks on the beach and stuffed animals. Charles has many nicknames, the most harmless being "Jobless" Charles von Reis. When Jonah is in his 60's he'll probably still be carded when trying to purchase liquor, I once made up the nickname "J-Bone" for him, and kept using it til it stuck. Keith is the inspiration for the goat, and pretty much every graphic associated with gristle.org. Sean likes to wreck Volvos (near as I can tell at least, he's had it in the shop 5 times already?). We've also had girlfriends move in, Neil's (Yumi) and Jonah's (Marisea). I wish I could say they were Yoko Ono's to our Beatles, but they're incredibly cool (and forgiving, we're sloppy) so I've got nothing but mad love for them too.

	Bathrooms Iowa style. I had no idea how much fun urinating in corn would be until I gave it a go.

As I was saying, I moved into the house with four of my friends, and nothing could have been better; in addition to living with four pretty cool guys we had a foosball table, satellite dish, and later a pool table... phat bachelor living at its finest. My job was pretty nice too, in addition to being fun I got TONS of vacation time, and was able to return as a counselor for a week at Camp Pinewood, where I've gone to camp for over 10 years (most as a counselor). I was also able to go on Ragbrai, a bike ride across the state of Iowa that I've been wanting to do for years. Both Ragbrai and camp were TOTALLY excellent, I got to do Ragbrai with my camp friends Max and Kim, both good friends who I hope you all have a chance to meet one day. At camp I got to check up on my former LIT's and CITs, (who I trained in the summer of '98), though they may not know it I think they're all really great and it was a real thrill to be able to work with them last summer. After camp I was able to make it to Chicago for a few days to catch up with some of my old high school friends, Martin, Andy, Jerry, Jen and Case, who is probably the closest thing I know to a linux guru (though I don't think he would call himself that).

Post Dataware

And then in November it all came crashing down. My company, which by that time was called LeadingSide, was in the crapper. It had fired all of the salespeople in our office (the main office was in Cambridge, MA) and wasn't bringing in any new business, which led to many days being spent playing darts. In the middle of November Cambridge finally shut us down, and I was out of a job. The plus side was that by the time I was fired I had a much deeper understanding of networking, and had a pretty decent understanding of Windows 9x, NT, and Linux, which meant that it wouldn't be long before I found work.

As it turns out I didn't really have to look for a job at all. Before I even finished getting my resume together my old boss from LeadingSide (Meara) called me and asked me if I wanted to come to work for her, which was nice because I enjoyed working for her and I didn't have to worry about going out and finding a job. So that's where I am today, working for Meara and living pretty much as I have been for the last couple of years. I expect to be able to attend Ragbrai and camp again this summer, I'll try visiting Chicago a couple of times during the year as well.

So, there's your gigantic dose of vitamin D(oug). If something new and exciting happens I'll update, but I wouldn't check more than once a year if I were you. If you want to know more send me an email, in the meantime... take care! I haven't changed this page for some time, but I just wanted to add that I hope for this to be the world's best bacteria on toilet site on the internet. Please check out all of the bacteria on toilet links.