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 and I have written custom software for the phone and scripts for the web server so you can see where my phone most recently reported in from:

Full-size Google map (works well in desktop browsers)
Regular Google map (works well on desktop, iPhone, Android)
OpenStreetMap (a cool open-data mapping project)
VataviaMap my software for desktop and Windows Mobile maps, GPS tracks, buddy location

My college web pages

Stuff I played with back in 1996 and before

Contact

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