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Current Activities, Projects and Plans 
Long, long, ago in a place far, far, away I graduated from an obscure private college in New Haven, Connecticut. Following my graduation I headed off for Washington, D.C. where I worked first as a paralegal and later spent most of 1980 working in the Presidential campaign of John B. Anderson, first during the Republiclan primaries and later during the indpendent third party campaign. Much as I loved the campaign, my time in Washington convinced me that, even then, there was a very real disconnect in that town regarding how wealth was created. With this in mind I headed off to New York in 1981 where I completed my MBA at Columbia University's Business School.Following my graduation from Columbia in 1982, I started a long term career in public finance at what was then one the great public finance investment banking houses, Merrill Lynch. While I moved around some based up compensation disputes, Merrill was my professional home for the better part of the next 12 years. In 1994, I decided it was time to take a long and much needed break. I then spent seven years travelling, working with the Internet and doing finance consulting. My travel destinations during this period included Chile, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia, India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Maylasia, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ireland, England, Scotland, Italy and Labrador. In mid 1995 I began to focus my energies on broadening my computer and Internet skills as part of an effort to develop my own Internet based electronic commerce business. In pursuing these and other Internet projects, I became quite proficient in both the PERL programming language and various Windows operating systems. One of the web sites I built and developed was the Land Rover Exchange which I sold to a new owner in 2005 but which continues to function using the technology that I designed. In early 1997, I moved from from New York City back to greater Boston to be closer to my fiancee (now wife) as well as my father and his family. In 1998, I began working parttime on various municipal finance consulting assignments with various former colleagues who had been at Merrill Lynch with me a decade earlier. At the beginning of September 2001 (it was the week of 9/11) I returned to work full time in the field of public finance investment banking with a major foreign owned investment bank. This invariably meant spending two or three weeks out of every month in New York City. A year and a half later I return to Merrill Lynch where I spent two more years until another compensation dispute triggered my resignation. I then worked with some other folks I knew well in the financial advisory business. All the while I was spending a very large portion of my time in Manhattan and growing more and more weary from the commute back and forth to Boston. Finally, in the fall of 2005, I gave up commuting to New York; a year or so later, working out of my office here in Massachusetts, I began serving as a senior advisor to a New York based transportation consultancy. My wife to be and I bought that home in the fall of 2000. The previous owners had been in residence roughly 56 years and, especially in the last 20 or 25 of those years, had allowed things to deteriorate. We promptly spent much of the next eight months stripping, sanding, spackling, and painting... to say nothing of managing a slew of contractors whom we hired to (re)build the kitchen and downstairs bath. In spite of all this work inside, we've also managed to focus a fair amount of energy on the outside where the yard which is now largely restored to its original verdant splendor after many seasons of benign neglect. We spend two weekends or so every summer off the Maine coast on a small island called Monhegan where we were married in July 2001. We took our honeymoon a year later in Scotland during the summer of 2002. The highlight of our travels was a wonderful guest house on the Isle of Harris. Our more recent travels have taken us to Montreal, Israel, Turkey, Barbados and France. I spend my free time reading and following politics. I've included excerpts from some of the books that I value at my Words and Ideas Page. The New Republic remains my favorite journal of political opinion. And, most recently, I've started a sort of Blog which consists of various political rants, tidbits and outrages and links to especially worthy ideas and essays. Contact Me
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