Andrew Scholnick:  

My life plan after college was to play with computers and get paid for it. Well, I've succeeded, and the general story is that I have clearly been blessed while doing so. Yes, there have been some tough times, ups and downs, good and bad. All the usual stuff of life, oscillating through the Brownian game-space of day-to-day happenstance, but the bottom line is that through it all, it is clear that I have had some sort of angel on my shoulder. If I died today (or back in 2005, which I will get to in a bit), it would be with the knowledge that I have made a difference in the world and in the lives of millions of people who will never know my name; and that makes all the rest worthwhile. The short list of recent world-changing stuff I have accomplished includes implementing the first real-time billing system for cellular telephony (enabling affordable pricing models to evolve), building the email gateway that put AOL on the internet (and contributing to some other large pieces of the early puzzle there), pioneering the first reliable cost-effective satellite encryption system (helping provide privacy where there was none before), re-writing the US Government's global videoconferencing system (it was broken, I fixed it), creating the first internet bid-board (long before eBay), and I have a patent pending on some game-changing security technology which I hope to se used widely some day. All of that while living in the D.C. and Northern VA area. Correspondingly, the general ...Expand for more