Home
Site News
Personal
About me
Pictures
Professional
School
Work
Resume (PDF)
Hobbies
Cooking
OFP
Programming
Writing
Old GDT Articles
Published
Links
Contact
About Me
Origins
I was born on May 17th, 1981 in the Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, NY. I was raised in Saugerties, NY; it's in the Mid-Hudson Valley, near Woodstock. My father worked at IBM as a mainframe technician and my mother stayed at home with my sister and I while we were young. During the early 1990 recession, she ended up started to work in the service industry. Generally, that's about the time things turned sour in the whole region. I used to be afraid of leaving home, but as time went on, I realized nothing I wanted to do in life was available back home.
I went to elementary school at St. Mary of the Snow. It was a Catholic school--take that as you wish. I stopped after 6th grade to study at Saugerties Junior and Senior High. Middle school was very rough, partly because of my personality and partly because people are just screwed up then. I'm still very cynical about it.
Nintendo was my main pasttime as a kid, but I started playing with computers seriously when I was 10. My father bought an IBM PS/2 and we got Prodigy. When I was 12, I got my own and eventually started BBSing and programming in C. My senior year, I took a research class and studied software analog synthesis; trying to replicate those old analog Moog synthesizers on a computer. I was into techno by that point.
I studied Computer Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology. My grades were OK, but I was more known for creativity (I was a weirdo) and random bizarre heroics in software. I started writing for Gracies Dinnertime Theatre, the campus' satire rag of ill repute, and you'll find my articles on this site. I was active in the Society of Computer Engineers when it was around, and I went to the anime club for a time. My senior project was a contactless dance pad for Dance Dance Revolution. Imagine instead of stomping on a foot pad to play the game, there were criss-crossed laser beams instead. it was a hit.
RIT's engineering program required co-ops, which were hard to find after the dotcom bust. It took many months, but I eventually got lucky. My first co-op was at Intel in Folsom, California. I did chipset validation there, which translated to running PERL scripts all day long. I was very bored there and I still feel it had something to do with a disintegration of my ability to focus. Partly to rebel against that, and partly because I had heard so much about Austin, I did my next tour at Advanced Micro Devices in their Software Research and Development group. That's where I work now.
Present Day
My name is Adam Preble, and I often use the online alias "Rocko Bonaparte." The name came out of writing I did as a kid. I continue to write mostly satire, but some sci-fi. I'm a big nerd after all. Being a nerd means I now also like to cook (cooking is the new Dungeons and Dragons) and play with computers all day long. I'm a taurus; which makes me a boring, stubborn cash cow-- the latter is disputeable. I live in Austin, TX and work for Advanced Micro Devices as a software research engineer.