Mark Gray's Home Page
A Brief History of Mark
I was born in New Hampshire and grew up mostly in Wichita, Kansas.
I went to Rice University in
Houston where I earned a Bachelor's in Computer Science.
I moved to Atlanta to attend
Georgia Tech and left with a
Master's degree (also in CS).
I have lived in the Atlanta area since 1991.
My Neighborhood
I live in East Lake Commons,
a neighborhood built to support quality time with your neighbors. Our
townhouses are close together, making it very easy to walk to anyone's
house. The space saved is partly left wild and partly used as an
organic farm. Each house is self-sufficient, but we also have a shared
"common house" with a commercial-quality kitchen, large dining area,
guest bedrooms, wood shop, TV room, exercise room, laundry, kids play
room and playground. This shared space makes it possible to host a
large party or have more overnight guests than fit in your house. A
Sunday meal group gets about 40 people together once a week for dinner
and takes turns cooking and cleaning.
My Job
Since late 1996 I have been working in Decatur with Aqua Terra
Consultants, a small environmental modeling company. We write software
that looks at historic data like rainfall, stream flow, and water
quality and can make projections about how things might change in the
future. We look for the likely effects of all kinds of things:
- What happens if we plant lots more corn to make ethanol?
- Is it a good idea to dredge up all those PCBs from the riverbed?
- How much of the copper in the bay is from brake pads?
- How likely is this place to have a flood or a drought?
- How might a new regulation help? (not digging too close to streams means less dirt in the water.)
- Climate change (hotter can lead to both more drought and more floods.)
I like working at a job that can have some positive impact on the
environment and makes good use of my computer programming and user
interface design skills.
My Current Location
My latest fun project is recording where I go with the GPS built into my phone.
I use this information to update
OpenStreetMap, a cool open-data mapping project.
I wrote VataviaMap,
software that runs on Windows desktop and Windows Mobile and displays maps, GPS tracks, and buddy locations.
I have not yet made a new version for my new phone, so for now I am using Google Latitude
to share where I am on the map at the right.
My college web pages
Stuff I played with back in 1996 and before
Contact
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