Pointers to People

• Bay Area Friends
• Out of Town Friends
• Namesakes

Bay Area Friends (with Home Pages)

• Jason Wong
  Jason works with me at TiVo. Great photographer, good game player, model employee (tee hee).

• Merrilee Proffitt
  Merrilee is great and smart and charming and she works at the U.C. Berkeley library (where she receives plenty of recognition. I met her at Berkeley through a bunch of mutual friends and we partied together and I interviewed about her experience during the '89 quake, and then we lost touch, and then I re-met her again and we'd get together in a big group and have dinner together and watch X-Files or Simpsons/Mad About You/Seinfeld together. Now I don't see her so often which makes me sad. She just got back from Borneo.

• John Restrick
  A lot of people wonder why he doesn't have a home page of his own.

• Jay Minn
  Jay Minn's an old high school and college buddy who has founded his own video game company...check it out.

• Jennie Chuang and Taff Rice-Evans don't really have home pages (they just threw these ones together on a lark one night), but they are two of my very closest friends in Berkeley. Jennie is a spy for Taiwan; she and I went out (years ago). Taff is a spy for Great Britain; he and I are in a band together.

• Sam G. Parazette and Erin Denney
  Sam and Erin are great friends! They're keen! I can't say enough good things about them! I knew them both from college. They lived in Wisconsin until recently, but now they've moved back to the Bay Area (we're all so glad!).

  Sam doesn't have even one word to say about himself, so you can find out about him here. He hates exclamation points, so the preceding paragraph is in honor of him.

• Rick Salsman
  Rick is a writer and the owner of Central Studios and a good friend from high school and college and beyond. He's a writer and a reader and a jokester and a hoper. We share much in musical taste. The fact that I was in his band sort of once upon time has nothing to do with my biases toward him. You can also read about his wife Janet (who is also a great friend of mine, and a great writer as well) and his daughter Syd, and about their youngest nipper, T.R..

• Paul Feffer
  Paul is a black belt in the Hapkido club (which I don't attend these days since I don't live in Berkeley any more), and he's also the guy who taught me the very little that I know about cross-country skiing. He's moved to New Jersey, the bum. But I hope he moves back soon.

• David Donahue
  David is an old friend, and a former client of mine too... His home page has a lot of great images, as well as a magical duel between him and some guy.

• Partha Banerjee
  Partha's just this guy who will one day rule the world. I would normally make fun of his home page, but word is that that upsets him, so please lavish it with praise. Since Partha doesn't link back to me, I must humiliate him by linking to his ex-college-roommate Boyd's Ode to Partha.

• Case Larsen
  Case, or Lars Larsen as we like to call him, is a certified genius or something like that. Partha calls him the Amazing Programming Dogboy. His clock speed is very high, and I'm not talking about computers here. His home page is very precise.

  Case's housemate, Sam Shen, is just as much of a genius as Case (but just barely). In addition, his great height guarantees that he has more wisdom than the rest of us. He's also very imposing now with his beard, and I would be afraid to fight him in a dark alley. Oh, he has good musical taste too.

• David Wooten
  The most important music-site in the whole wide Web is the amazin' Tohu-Bohu visitor's page. Slyboots (David Wooten) sent me this Tohu-Bohu link html page by e-mail so that I could get there more easily. Now you can too.

• Rebecca Underwood
  Rebecca is currently a manager working for SGI and we both happened to take the same writing class through Berkeley Extension a few years ago. Now we're in small writing group with a few other writers. Rebecca's a cool person; she and I share an interest in short stories and a healthy curiosity about computers.

• Lea Daugherty
  Lea's the best photographer I know, as well as an amazing storehouse of fun facts, trivia and puns. To know her is to admire her. She used to live in Boulder, Colorado -- and moved to the Bay Area not so long ago.

• Perry Friedman
  Perry, he and I go WAAAAAY back. I mean, umm, so it's true that I've not actually met the guy but I almost did once. Wait, I've met him now in Vegas. A few times. Anyway, we've got that roshambo thing in common. He and I have sent so much mail back and forth that I feel I know that he's a dangerously insanely weird individual.

Out of Town Friends

• Beverley R. White
  It's Beverley a.k.a. Wednesday, and if she isn't everything and the cats' pajamas, no one is. Brilliant, funny, sad, and every shade in between. She's a powerful writer and graphic artist.

• Steve Hastings
  Steve is a high school friend who studied computer science at U.C. Santa Cruz, and then moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft. Well, he doesn't work for Microsoft anymore which makes him much less stressed, but he still lives in Seattle. His beautiful and talented wife Denise has a page as well.

• Larry Hastings
  Larry is Steve's younger brother, a musician, computer scientist, graphic artist and Libyan terrorist. Except that last one.

• Heather Alexander
  I used to hang out with Heather, her now-husband Phil along with Matt P. King and some other fine folk. I haven't seen Heather in a while, and now her singing career is taking off. She's an amazing talent. Read all about her...

• Laura Baldwin
  We were excellent friends in seventh grade and eighth grade, until she moved to Virginia. Now she lives near MIT. She still likes computers and role-playing -- neither of us have changed much in 13 years, I guess.

• Rebekah Villon I've been meaning to add Rebekah for a long time. She lives up in Oregon and we've talked a lot by e-mail. She's a great writer and an even better thinker. You must read her site because it's Allegory, a great poetry and fiction magazine -- and she's reprinted one of my stories.

Namesakes

But figure that "Mack" is the 352nd most popular last name in America and "Stephen" is the 34th most popular male first name, so the combo has to occur pretty frequently given 285-odd million Americans. (These figures are from the U.S. Government Census Bureau's "Frequently Occuring Names in America -- 1990" statistics.)

Anyway, there's another Stephen Mack in Berkeley (we used to get each other's phone calls all the time), and there's probably more than five hundred Steve Macks in the world.

Why there's even a Stephen Mack Middle School in Beloit, Wisconsin; is this near Macktown, Illinois? Read about the mural to Stephen Mack and the life of this settler. It's creepy, I tell you, darn creepy.

Naturally, a couple of the Steve Macks in the world have home pages. See if you can spot what hobbies we have in common. "UNCANNY!!! IS IT GENETIC?!!?!?!"

I'm always seeking more people who have my name (even if they misspell "Stephen" as "Steven"). Let me know if you find any.

• Steven E. Mack
  A Steve Mack who lives in Australia. His home page is not for the faint of bandwidth... He calls it Steve Mack's unusual Homepage(s). More dancing baloney than you can shake a boomerang at.

• Stephen K. Mack
  A graphical artist with a 3-D gallery. He doesn't say much about himself, but his art is impressive.

• Steve Mack
  A Steve Mack in Frankfort, Kentucky who writes the Macintosh Assistant Tips and Tutorial Newsletter.

• Steve Mack
  This Steve Mack lives in the U.K. (near where I was born, actually).

• Steve Mack
  Another Steve Mack, but one who doesn't say much about himself or where he lives. Kind of a stark contrast from me, really.

• There's a Steve Mack who's a stuntman (Christine and I saw him listed in the credits when we saw Ransom, and you can read (very little) about said stuntman at Stunt Net.

• Apparently I co-directed a film in 1982 -- oh wait, that was another Stephen Mack.

• Bob Mack's Web Home
  A guy with the same name as my brother Robert...

• Steve Mack
• Steve Mack
  A Virginian with a Prodigy and Netrail page. His pages seem to have gone, though. He used to even link back to me -- that made him tops in my list. He'll have to explain the "Agent Orange" thing to me, though (but that's all right, I'll have to explain "Zeigen" to him). Assuming his pages show up again.

More links are available in the bookmarks page; or you can bravely survey some kibologist home pages, where some of my favorite people-who-I-haven't-actually-met-so-I-can't-really-call-them-"friends" reside.