Brady Farrand:  

I am a husband, father, retired Computer User Interface Architect, and occasional cook, gardener, and antique book aficionado. When I was born my parents had no commitment to a name for me. They went searching through a baby name book. When they found the then-unusual name “Brady” my mother liked it. It reminded her of her father’s name, “Grady,” without throwing off the mother/father family balance by actually naming me after her father. My father never mentioned that four generations of first-born sons in his family sported the middle name “Augustus.” Mom told me that would have been my name if he had mentioned the family history. I have no idea how they settled on “Alan” for my first name. But Amma came out to help Mom when I was born. She started calling me “Brady,” so “Brady” I became. In my childhood, especially when I changed schools, Mom asked me whether I wanted to be called “Alan.” But I was used to, and happy with a name no one else had. So I kept it. My suburban childhood was idyllic. My family had financial security based on my father’s competence at his job. We had the community, food and shelter afforded by America in the 50’s and 60’s. We had the existential threat of the Cold War and later, Vietnam, but I could and did usually ignore such fears. If you want to look at personality as a product of traumas, I became shy when I sat down on the “girl’s side” of the bus my first day of kindergarten, and I became penurious when my cherished balsawood airplane crashed and splintered on its maiden flight. Born in North Hollywood in 1950, we soon moved to Downey for my father’s job with Autonetics. My brother Scott and my sister Lanah were born there. We grew up in a typical suburban nuclear family, with a stay-at-home Mom and a commute-to-work Dad. In 1959 we moved to Fullerton, moving up from a middle-class neighborhood to an upper-middle-class neighborhood. We went to Sunny Hills High School, played with the neighborhood kids after school, and went on camping vacations. My father worked for Autonetics, then taught at Cal State Fullerton. He NEVER talked about his work, but I later learned he invented, built, and installed the inertial guidance device that let the Nautilus find the North Pole in 1958. He designed and managed the construction of the Minuteman I guidance system, our first ICBM. He later invented the first electronic calculator to hit the market. I started college in 1969 at Caltech, then the most difficult college in the US to get into. Before departing for UC Berkeley during my Sophomore year I not only had all the school laying siege to my dorm trying to capture me, I worked my tail off trying to keep up with a curriculum aimed at future Nobel Prize candidates. At Berkeley I got involved in experimental psychology, taking both undergrad and graduate classes. I started at Stanford’s top-rated Experimental Psychology program in the fall of 1974. More life on short rations, me and my bike living in a converted tool shed in downtown Palo Alto. However, I spent all my time at my office, in the library, teaching or running experiments, mostly on visual memory or how people remember false information. I developed wonderful friendships there. One summer my sister and I toured Europe on Eurail passes, staying at Youth Hostels, and renting bicycles. By the time I got my Ph.D. I was living part-time with my future wife Kate (also a Stanford Psych Ph.D.) back in Berkeley. I found a job doing research and writing grants on psychological factors in room comfort at UC. I was bicycling up and down the hills most every day, and doing some work for Lockheed back in Mountain View. Then I got a Visiting Scientist position at IBM Research in San Jose, and really started my career as a Silicon Valley commuter. At various companies I came up with bright ideas for screen designs that would do the job, created mockups, drawings, and papers that explained the designs, wrote manuals describing how to design, and tested and improved the designs with typical users. Along the way I taught a couple of times at Berkeley. Kate and I were married in 1981 as I began my professional career. For the next several years I worked for a series of companies designing user...Expand for more