bio

1. Technologist

Erik Ray is a programmer of computers specializing in web applications and text processing with XML. His current gig is with C.A.S.T., a non-profit organization specializing in uses of technology in education. His experience with computers goes back to the days when he had a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer with 32k of RAM on which he wrote text adventures and 3-D maze generators. Since then he has worked for a computer video game company, Harvard University, and O'Reilly Media writing code in just about every computer language in common use, and some that aren't. He is the author of Learning XML and Perl & XML for O'Reilly Media. He lives in the northeast because he loves the cold.

2. Mad Scientist

Since he was a slobbering lad, Erik Ray has been obsessed with every shiny technology to cross his consciousness. In his mind, he has eaten cornflakes in a bathyscaph with Jacques Cousteau, sipped cognac with Jules Verne aboard a mahogany-panelled rocket ship, and swapped charcoal penciled blueprints for ornithopters with Leonardo Da Vinci. His heart pumps the the blood of an ill-advised explorer, his mouth babbles endlessly like Buckminster Fuller, and his feet reek with the stink of a thousand travelled miles. Someday, he hopes some of his bright ideas will help mankind, or at least provide some light entertainment.

3. Hyperbolic

Erik Ray is the inventer of the word jerkoraisin, a term destined to become one of the most important buzzwords of the 22nd century. He is large in several dimensions and is often mistaken for a feature left behind by a retreating glacier. When not stuck inside an emacs window, he is often seen wandering the streets of the greater boston area, possibly lost. He is a member in good standing of a flock of parrots (not the 80's band Flock of Seagulls), and a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Whenever possible and safe, he tries to do what other people are not doing because it is not worth an intelligent person's time to be in the majority.

4. Crackpot

Following the tradition of his ancestors, Erik Ray aspires to be a crackpot. He has developed several crazy theories that he plans to shout to people from street corners. His obligatory conspiracy theory to proving that the scientific establishment is suppressing his ideas is almost complete. He will build a huge archimedian solid out of bamboo suspended in trees and live inside it. Many strange and compelling ideas will emerge from his mind, only to be lost in notebooks that will not be found until decades after his death and then burned in a fireplace.

5. Completely Untrue

Erik Ray was born in 1959 on a small rocky island in the North Atlantic Ocean to a family of lighthouse keepers. He learned to row a small dinghy in stormy waves before he learned to walk. For most of his childhood, he helped his 3 brothers and 4 sisters sew clothing from kelp and keep the nuclear power generator running to power the lighthouse. Later, he joined the merchant marine and travelled the world on cargo ships. On the long, lonely terms on board these vessels he read every book he could get his hands on, and he wrote a number of novels. Though not financially successful, he was popular with a very small group of fans who found his dystopian wunderberg tales to be profoundly entertaining. In his later years, Ravelgrane retired to a tiny, abandoned research station on a rocky island. He started a religion as a joke, which to his surprise became wildly successful. His abode disappeared in a storm in 2008 and he has not been heard from since.