First!

OK, here's the obligatory first post, to let people know who I am and what I'm doing. I am Mano Marks. I am, at this point, 39 years old, and I've done a fairly wide variety of things with my life. In 1993, I got a Masters in History from Columbia, and in 2006 I got a Masters of Information Management and Systems (like a post-modern Library Science degree) from UC Berkeley. In between, I worked at a high school, a Masters program, taught college, worked at a rape crisis center, a community center, a youth services organization, and a hardware distributor. I've imagined myself a professor, a social worker, a programmer, and most recently a technology evangelist. What really shines through, though, is that I am and always will be, a geek. I don't tell you all this to brag, just as a warning, my ideas and interests tend to come from a lot of different places.

I work at Google, but this isn't an official Google blog, just my personal one. I started it because I have a lot of thoughts on interesting projects and like to record things that I bump into, great apps and code, things that might not make it into an official blog. Also, this way I can blog about some of my other interests, things that don't necessarily directly relate to Geo, like history, linguistics, disaster relief, politics, document engineering, and possibly even video games. Hopefully, some of it will be interesting. Anyway, now that the first post is out of the way, we'll see how long it takes me to get to the next one.