COSC 330

APPLIED SIMULATION

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Damian Hart Biography-of-sorts

Damian Hart is a relatively new adjunct professor here at UB. In order to understand him and his way of teaching, it might be handy to understand his bizarre and checkered background…in his words.

I grew up in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, near the Arkansas border. The nearest town—West Plains, population 5,000—was 5 miles away. The nearest “big city” was Springfield, MO which was 100 miles from home. When I was growing up, television was in black-and-white and had only three channels. You had to get up, walk across the room, and turn a dial to change the channel! "Dialing" a phone meant walking to the phone and actually using a dial! We were on a party-line which meant that although we had our own number, we shared the phone line "connection" with 3 other families. Anytime one of them got a call our phone would vibrate. We could tell who was getting a call by the force of the vibration! I really did spend most of my younger years as a barefoot hillbilly! Damian Hart is not my original name.

I remember the ruckus when the first digital watch hit the market, followed closely by the early digital—and portable—personal calculators. I recall these beauties selling for around $150 at the time and were about the size of a Nokia phone. Of course, you couldn't use them in sunlight because you couldn't see the numbers on the screen!

During my senior year in high school, the math department started an “Introduction to Computers” course. This course involved writing out your program, using punch cards to compose your program, then scheduling time in the lab (one computer) (one HUGE computer) to feed your cards into the computer to program it. Once that was done, you ran your program and hoped it worked. Your output was usually a stack of paper from the huge, expensive, loud, slow dot-matrix printer. If the program didn't run, you had to take your punch cards home with you, study your written program looking for the errors, repunch your cards, reschedule your lab time..and try again.

Math was never my strong suit and I couldn't imagine such big, clunky things as computers being worthwhile. I developed no interest in computers or programming, so I never got involved with them.

My focus during that time was on theatre. I graduated from high school on a Friday in May of 1981 and—desperate to get away from a small hick town—started college 200 miles away, on the following Monday. I was now in a much larger (by our standards) town.

That college was called School of the Ozarks (since renamed to College of the Ozarks) near Branson , Missouri . It was a “work / study” college for poor hillbillies. Students held down 20-hour-a-week jobs on campus as groundskeepers, dining hall employees, in the laundry, in the mill, or where-ever the college needed workers. We punched time clocks, and our wages went directly to our accounts to pay for tuition, room-and-board, and lab fees. For a year and a half I studied theatre there then left to pursue an acting job in Kansas City .

I've always been a multi-tasker, so from here things start to overlap each other.

The job in Kansas City fell through, but during that time I met a young lady, fell in love, married, and had a baby boy. After the failed acting stint, I could not go back to college as I had a family to support, so I moved the family back to West Plains just long enough to catch my breath then launch myself forward again. Over the next few years, I worked many odd jobs, many odd combinations, but always making small steps forward. I spent several years working as an instructor in a dance studio where I took and taught tap, ballet, and jazz dancing to children, teens, and adults. I appeared in a couple of very short-lived commercials, as an extra in a couple of movies (such as “Major League II”). I even re-took up my childhood hobby of magic and began performing a few magic shows.

Ultimately, in a fit of “I need to do something valuable with my life,” I joined the US Navy. When it came time to choose my job in the Navy, I decided to do something insanely challenging and became a linguist. I'd always wanted to learn a language, but never wanted to study Spanish or French in high school / college. So when it came time to choose a language, I again opted for insanely challenging and picked Arabic!

If you don't know anything about it, I'll tell you this much. The military has a language school in California . That's where I spent an full year, studying Arabic every day of the week for an entire year. We had eight hours of classes solely in Arabic (or whatever language you were studying), plus an additional four-or-more hours of Arabic homework every night. By the end of the year…I had more-or-less mastered the Arabic language.

I spent the next four years working as a linguist at Fort Meade , Maryland .

Meanwhile… I divorced my wife, took custody of my son, helped build a traveling song/dance/acting road show for military members who were interested in performing. We turned that into an active theatre group in Annapolis called the “Other Little Theatre.” I sang, danced, choreographed, acted, built sets, built props, and even directed a few shows for that group.

In fact, I directed our favorite show—the musical “The Fantasticks.” Our base sponsor warned us that we could not possibly perform the show as it was expensive and we did not have an orchestra. Nonetheless, he let us give it a try. I decided to present the entire production as “low tech” as possible (“The Fantasticks” is perfect for doing so). There was only one set, there were almost no lighting changes, and my entire orchestra was one sweet lady playing a single piano. That's it. One piano.

On our final dress rehearsal, we had frightening news. An arts reviewer from the Annapolis newspaper was coming to review the show. One week earlier, she had gone to the Naval Academy 's choir show…and destroyed them in her review. In fact, she had a pretty ugly reputation. …and she was coming to see us. But we decided to remember that we were doing our show for our entertainment, so we did our rehearsal anyway just the way we loved doing it. And the next day, we held our breath….

…and she loved us. She spent nearly an entire page in the newspaper gushing over how wonderful every little detail was up to—and most especially—the brave decision to use only a single piano as an orchestra. We were stunned and delighted. The show (even after paying all the expensive royalties) made more money than any other show we had produced and with the funds we were able to buy new curtains and a new spotlight for our theatre.

So, you're probably wondering how all that leads to this course.

Our sound technician in the theatre group used a cassette tape recorder to manage sound effects. He'd create a tape of sounds for each show in the order we needed them, the press the play button at the right time—positioning the recorder near a microphone—to produce the sound effect. It was not lovely. The audience would hear CLICK! Hisssssssss Ding, Dong! CLICK!

Well. Prior to the Navy enlistment a friend of mine who was interested in computers introduced me to the Commodore Vic 20. This was a terrific little computer, quite cheap, and amazingly popular for its time. From the success of the Vic 20, Commodore produced the Commodore 64, 128, and the Amiga line of computers. I had them all, and had taught myself some very rudimentary programming skills in BASIC. More importantly, however, was that the Commodore 64 and Amiga played some great games!

Now to tie the two stories together.

Upset with the noise of the tape recordings, I decided to use my Amiga to create a sound effects program for the theatre. I recorded sounds, then turned them into digitized files on the computer. I used an authoring program called “CanDo” and wrote a program that would display (to the show's technical director) the cue for the sound effect, and a big button that he need only quietly click with the mouse to play. If a problem occurred onstage, he was able to skip forward or backward through the sounds to quickly locate the next sound he needed…something impossible with the old tape deck.

Things continue to blend together. I finished my five years in the Navy and thankfully begin to forget all the Arabic I had learned. I still lived in the Baltimore / DC area. I began doing more and more magic shows and even picked up a few agents who began sending me around to various events. I performed for First Night Annapolis for a few years, I have done a couple of television interviews, I built a musical magic show called Abra-Kid-Abra and spent many years performing at malls, corporate events, and even took the show back to my home town to show them what their former hillbilly had been up to!

Time flows onward. Commodore sort of fades away. Apple and IBM fight with each other over computer hardware. Apple and Microsoft battle with each other over the “best” operating system. Microsoft eventually wins with “Windows”…which looks remarkably like the “windowed” system that Apple ---and the Amiga--- used.

My son and I were living with another fellow named Russell, a fellow former Navy linguist who specialized in Hebrew, who was now an instructional designer working for a company that creates software training. When a company needs to teach its employees something, they'd hire him to study the material and then suggest and design their training. Often the training would be done with the aid of computers.

One day, Russell came home with news. His company was working on a training package for a Canadian firm. They wanted the training to be done in a particular authoring environment called “Toolbook.” Very few knew Toolbook, but Russ looked at it and realized it was very close to what I had used when I created my sound-effects program for the theatre group. He told his company about me, and they called me in for an interview.

I went in and chatted with them. I told them that (1) I was an Amiga fan. (2) I was not an IBM fan. (3) I was not a Windows fan. (4) I had no idea, really, what CBT (computer based training ) was. (5) I was not a programmer (6) I had no idea what Toolbook was. (7) I really wasn't the best choice for the project.

This, by the way, is not the best way to apply for a job.

I went on to say that (a) I was more than willing to help out and (b) if I can learn Arabic in a year, I could most likely tackle Toolbook, and (c) if they understood that I'd be learning while I was working…I'd do my best.

Before I got out of the door, the hiring manager had circled around, cut me off at the pass, and presented me with a job offer. The next day I found myself as a programmer being paid $40 an hour and working on a six million dollar contract! Talk about pressure to learn!

But I did learn. I spent many years there. During that time, Windows 95 appeared and swept the world. CD drives went from new technology that was much-too-expensive to a replacement for the floppy. Zip drives and zip disks became the must-have for portable data. Cell phones were toys for the elite.

There began buzz about something new on the scene—at least new to the common folk called “the internet.” For a while, you could attach a modem to your computer, attach a phone line to the modem, and by using some rather obscure commands, you could talk to another computer (similarly rigged up) and--gasp!--download a file from that computer into yours!

Many people poo-poo'd this notion, including Russell. Then the Internet grew up and became “The Web,” which allowed you to see pictures over the phone line—can you imagine such a thing!?

Russell and I left the company we were working for. My magic shows were doing so well that I changed my name from what it was originally to Damian Hart which is more “show business”-like and began to travel a bit. We started our own software training company called “Romeo Square” and spent a few years on our own. He'd design the training, and I'd use Toolbook to program the training. We did quite a bit of training, and I learned—and invented—quite a number of tricks in Toolbook…things the Toolbook folks didn't even know that Toolbook could do. For instance, I wrote a Toolbook program that wrote other Toolbook programs! Pretty swanky, stuff.

Nearby Northrop Grumman wanted a testing lab created at their site for their employees. Russell designed the course, and I programmed it. As we worked, the testing administrators there said, “You know, we're going to be using this lab for years, but we cannot expect that you will always be around to help us out. Can you teach us how to program so that we can maintain the system, and add new content ourselves?” That's quite an order, but I did it. They've had their testing lab running for about eight years now, they're still using it (I have my contacts!), and they've not called me back for programming help, so my lessons must have been good.

However, the Web was getting more and more popular and companies began wanting to deliver their training over the web. Sadly, Toolbook did not translate well to the web (although they tried…and continue to try to this day). But this other package called “Flash” had come along and was making headlines.

So, one Friday night I'm sitting around the house and Russell looks up from his computer and says, “You know, Damian, you're essentially the CEO of Romeo Square…but you don't yet have a degree!” (Russell has his Masters and is working on his PhD.) Then he adds, “I've found a degree program that I think would be perfect for you. It's local, it teaches Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Director, Web technologies, and game programming.”

The next Monday I found myself in a meeting with Mrs. Harmeyer (who ultimately became Dr. Harmeyer) at CCBC Essex, and became a student in the SDE program!

If you've read this far, take heart. We're almost done, and here's where the whole mess comes together in an interesting (if not tidy) bundle.

While at CCBC, I create a bit of a splash. Using those backgrounds in magic, theatre, programming, and instructional design, I found myself turning in homework projects that were considerably beyond the scope expected. In the fourth week of my Mult 110 “Introduction to Game Programming” class, I created a text-adventure called “Steve's Socks” which was later given away as a prize during a “Computer Game Day.” I co-authored “Breakout Adventure” with two other amazing student game-designers/programmers, and used Flash to create an interface for Mult 212 that showed off all the work I'd done in all my classes that semester. For the next semester's Mult 210 “Game Programming II” I went overboard in homework assignments and created “Head-to-Head Rock/Paper/Scissors,” “Spinner,” and “Pixie Panic.” My final project of that semester, “Aw, Nutz!” was co-authored with a fellow student. I manage several websites (incorporating Flash in each one), and completely redesigned the website for a DC-based aerospace company as part of a summer internship.

And finally, we arrive at more-or-less the present. I ended my time at CCBC and was surprised to win the Mult department's student of the semester award. I was further surprised to find myself as a Phi Theta Kappa honors student, and enrolled in Honor classes at University of Baltimore. We were all collectively surprised to discover that I (as well as several of my fellow students…all of us from CCBC's Mult department) had won University of Baltimore's Wilson Scholarship which provides a full 100% tuition at UB. When I was asked to join the CCBC staff as an instructor, "surprise" was no longer adequate and we were forced to resort to astonishment. (Thank you to Douglas Adams for that little riff.)

I finished my last SDE class in December of 2006 and graduated in Jan of 2007. Dr. Harmeyer wasted little time in snapping me up as an instructor and getting me into the classrooms of UB. So here we are.

So, you can see what an odd, colorful, and checkered background I have. And there's more that I haven't shared. As Pee Wee Herman said in his movie, “There's things about me you wouldn't understand… things you couldn't understand… things you shouldn't understand.” But at least this semester, as we roll through the course, you'll understand how this new professor got to be the nutty, flighty, expansive, theatrical guy that you see before you.