Dan Keller's Perpetually-Under-Construction Home Page...
Dan Keller's Perpetually-Under-Construction Home Page...
in Ukraine, Syria, Burma, Palestine, or anywhere else
and in 2019 and 2020 I did three extended 
water-only fasts,
in 2020 was interviewed
about nursing in Covid times
(listen!)
by
Lezak Shallat (hear her
on
SoundCloud)
and in 2019 after two intensive years of development released 
NurseAssess,
an app that smooths nursing workflow and I built
NurseMind,
an app that, in the spirit of
Atul Gawande's healthcare checklist revolution
is changing
how nurses work
via my startup 
Nurse Tech, Inc. and I
blog about all that
(and especially at Dan Keller's 
Nursing, Health Policy and Healthcare Technology Blog) and was
interviewed about it in my school paper, Synapse,
got 
patent 9164656,
thought about time
management
,
got vaccinated 
(many of my SNF patients had Covid),
write essays and stuff
,
used to eat vegan 
(here's why) until I got lazy,
keep my 
photo albums on the Web,
miss my mother Judith Jewel Herman
(also a nurse) who passed away in 2017, have a
daughter Cara whose middle name is Sphere
for 
Thelonious Sphere Monk, and a son Alexi who
in July 2011 
joined an army and
dug trenches and fired machine guns,
I went again to Jazzcamp
(after a 21-year hiatus) and loved it!,
in 2021 I am learning tennis 
,
in 2013 toured the 
medical facilities of Cuba (world's highest doctor/patient ratio; 2nd is Italy)
-- we can learn from them --
grew up in Rome
where, as a boy 
I dubbed hundreds of 2nd-rate movies
such as Yongary, Monster from the Deep (1967)
(my first line is at 5'25") and was
interviewed about Rome dubbing by 
Johan Melle
and in 2008 moved back there with my kids
for a year
where we had a lot of water
but the Romans don't worry until it reaches the
occhialone (big eye) di Ponte Sisto
and where the brilliant Susan Levenstein blogs 
Stethoscope
on Rome -- especially informative regarding Covid --
and if you curse the mediocrity of American pop culture just listen to
Italian Gattino Virgola ringtones that blessedly are not on
the cellphones of my kids (who used to be small)
and in 2008
attended
St. Stephen's where some meetings did seem
to last 37 years (click this link to see a great photo caption)
and have 
fond memories of my high school senior year
and in 2014 went looking for ancestral roots in 
Romania and Ukraine
and in 2016
cruised the canals of France
on a penichette
but my kids do love 
sushi which I tell them to enjoy before
the oceans are lifeless 
(could theirs be the last generation to eat wild-caught fish?)
and I took them in 2016 to 
Burning Man
(my pix),
for 22 years had a business
and the business had a home page -- we pioneered
the paperless classroom
(power corrupts; Powerpoint corrupts absolutely)
and our own 
management system
(by to-do list)
-- I even have a
personal mission statement
-- and I am a newly-licensed RN with
a healthcare blog
and in December, 2010 was "pinned" (how nurses graduate) at
(click us!) 
SMU
(a vocational school)
where I learned that
the 
kidneys (not the brain) run the show and we must remedy the mediocrity of
post-secondary education (the good news is that
we can fix it)
despite my bitter experience at the
surprisingly-mediocre USF,
and my swim-in-the-Bay
buddy Hyo Kim
is doing real preventive healthcare
while I 
rant endlessly,
wrote my first program on an 
IBM 360 on punched cards
in Fortran
taught to me by
Neil MacFarlane,
got a master's degree in
Medical Information Science
(here are some
reminiscences)
from 
UCSF where I was privileged to be advised by
Dr. Marsden Scott Blois,
a pioneer in
medical concept representation,
published 
a paper (1983),
and today I'm certain that nursing education -- always a few steps behind --
needs to add 
a nursing informatics clinical rotation,
and collected a few
autographs
of computing giants
but let's be careful not to
unleash a monster though I
once had 
a
tricycle and later an
answering machine,
have been thinking about business
and real estate in Italy about which country I have 
opinions
and 
Dolce Trastevere
for whom I made a web site (but they've gone out of business...
guess it didn't help),
and I did create
Wifi-Italia
and Italy's first free public Wifi site
(former Italian president 
Cossiga repeatedly pumped my hand, extolling wireless technology -- he's got three wifis in his house)
-- and here's my San Francisco house
(it has only two) 
and custom-built Sun Frost
appliances 
(yes, that's my kitchen on their web site)
and a 
Tel-a-Tronic Signal Center
and was featured on
the cover of the Oct. 2004 SF Apartment magazine
and was the set for one episode of a short-lived TV series named
Partners in Crime (1984) starring Lynda Carter and Loni Anderson
and 
Google StreetView caught me there,
had a piano floated up three flights by the astonishing 
Ed Gong,
and now my garage has a zero-emissions
electric car in it and
25 solar panels on the roof
in the San Antonio district of Oakland (though I lived for 30 years in the Castro district
of 
San Francisco), 
a town that had a great Mayor
(he's now Governor... soon President? though the one we have now (2024)
is pretty good)
though we do have
earthquakes
the real threat is climate change 
that could
end California's status as America's salad bowl and, says Mark Schapiro (with whom I played in the short-lived 
Deadliners band with Jonathan Alford
our favorite mail man on piano),
(midwestern wheat crops 
are threatened, too), and in a
state
whose
economy recently surpassed the UK to become the world's fifth-largest
and now I live in Oakland
and the
Oakland Riviera is where it's at
-- with a remarkable Oakland Sound pedigree (when it was named Freeway Recording) including
the incomparable D'wayne Wiggins
and
his Tony! Toni! Tone`! (go Oakland!) who recorded here and they did my favorite
What's Your Sign
-- but my favorite home was for two years the
MSO Lucid
(a surplused Korea-vintage Navy minesweeper),
burned out and gave up on 
cohousing
(and in 2014 shook the hand of 
Oakland Mayor Jean Quan
groundbreaking a cohousing project),
think about 
retirement,
and am fond of technology
but people are even more interesting so I
have volunteered at the 
UCSF Medical Center
(Long Hospital and medical records),
at the 
SF General Hospital
Emergency Room, at the
Glide Memorial clinic,
at the 
CPMC hospital Emergency Room,
and at the 
SF AIDS/HIV/HepC Nightline,
at the Tobacco Education Center for whom I taught and built the 
Tobacco Teacher web site
and as an RN for 
Project HomelessConnect,
and have run
smoking cessation programs at 
Kaiser sites in the Bay Area and at
Mills-Peninsula
-- read the interview
and
a classic denial story --
and served as Factotum-in-Chief for 
Gary Heit's Americare Neurosurgery
International delivering equipment, training, and
high-tech medical care
to the third world
(went
in March, 2008, to Hue, Vietnam) but he died in 2023 (who will take his place?) and have ridden around in
ambulances where
Governor
Boobengrabber picked the wrong fight when he said he was
"Kicking our nurses' butts" and I had a father
who was a painter and politico (I am a red
diaper baby)
and some things never change
and my father did
the artwork
for this website and for
my company's training manuals (losing him in 2006 made a tough year tougher),
my mother
was a filmmaker and playwright
(here is a
trailer on 
YouTube)
who wrote the story of Taxi,
the ferry-house dog and had success with her play
Funny Feeling
(that's her granddaughter Cara in the poster),
have a sister 
Martheeenia --
who is (also) a great artist with
a painting in New York's Metropolitan Museum 
and her husband 
Brad who designed
Estee Lauder
and makes juice,
another sister, Katy 
who traveled the world as the physical therapist for the
New York City Ballet
and 
fixes broken
violinists at the Juilliard School and invents
machines
to make dancers better
and is married to
Colter the Voiceover King
and my grandfather Sidney (my middle name)
invented the
Keller machine 
and the process
(called, oddly enough, kellering)
for creating dies to cast curved steel surfaces (that made possible
streamlined cars) whereas
my other grandfather
(Herman Herschkowitz, renamed himself
Harry Herman at Ellis Island) came to America on Nov. 18, 1906,
aboard the S.S. Amerika 
(which reported icebergs just three hours before one sank the Titanic),
I invented the 
Narciss-O-Meter,
have an apocalyptic vision of
inevitable and catastrophic
environmental collapse
with global
marine impacts (especially ocean acidification) largely unnoticed
(even the
Pentagon knows we're screwed...)
we're headed for a long emergency
("America's oil consumption is the greatest misallocation of
resources in the history of the world... Suburbia is going to
fail. You can state that categorically..." says
James Kunstler
(one of my gurus) in America's New Religion),
peak oil was in the 70s and now we have
peak water
and record-breaking drought in California
and other visions of the future 
and in 2024 I have joined 
Citizens Climate Lobby to work on this
and Michael Stocker
and Ocean Conservation Research
are doing something about the noisy
oceans,
have done projects for Silicon Valley companies including
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and
and 
and 
and 
and 
,
and have had a few
business
cards along the way, love to attend the 
Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop,
for years relied utterly on an antique
but marvelous piece of engineering --
HP's 200LX palmtop PC (it runs
DOS!) and I still write
HTML
by hand,
spend too much time administering my network and a few dozen web sites,
with things like
Bruce Borcherdt's Midas Niggard,
have had my share of "customers from hell"
but, thankfully, none quite like
the infamous Thrasher
, toured the
Artificial Intelligence Lab
and robotics workshops of MIT with my boyhood pal
Devon McCullough
and patted a
Lisp Machine 
,
once acted in a movie
(that's me, second from the right) with 
Rock Hudson -- it's not a chick flick and
here's how to tell 
and Bing 
watched it as a child in the Philippines
-- ten points if you can name this movie 
--
and now blogs about it
and I just discovered that pretty much everything I know
(e.g. what is 
spam
-- really! check it out!) has been collected in
a
single, succinct document -- yes! 
an IETF RFC!
and New Age is debunked 
here
-- in California (which has
much
in
common with
Italy)
and rowed for St. Stephen's School and on the San Francisco Bay and
on the Tiber River
-- I like adventure sports
-- diving, parachuting, etc. (here's
parasailing in Mexico),
and if you get a chance to see the
Red Bastard, go! he's brilliant! and I
had a cat and Roman friends
(Leo and Marilena)
who are devoted
cat people and 
a cat watches Psycho
and now have two cats, 
Claude Shannon
(whose hand I once shook and autograph collected)
and Norbert Wiener,
and my pal Pat Olson 
showed that the Plague of Athens was Ebola -- is it coming back? --
and makes
us wear togas
and I lived for my first seven years on
Danskammer Farm
and here are links to my elementary school
(The
American Overseas School)
and
(we
visited in June, 2007) my high school (St.
Stephen's School (which almost
went bankrupt in my senior year)) 
in Rome (where my family moved after Danskammer)
where as a teen I danced to the 
Free Love 
in the Teen Club
in the catacomb beneath St. Paul's-within-the-Walls
and I go back every year (here are 
pix from May, 2005) and in 2008-2009 actually
returned to
Rome
for a year and my
kids attended St. Stephen's too!,
have friends Lisa and Tom who run the beautiful Italophillic web site
Your
Garden Show,
Naomi
who teaches adoring children the joys of classical strings,
quasi-Roman friend Graeme Thomas who won awards for his stupendous
Kubrick 2001, The Space Odyssey Explained
(some great
Flash)
and of course you recognize
this line,
and now he's made the official 
International Year of the
Potato web site (in five languages!),
won a few awards myself
and here's
another adoptive-Roman friend, Catherine
who received an MBE from
this emissary (recognize him?)
of the Queen of England for running
the
Keats-Shelley House,
and regarding
things Italian
do your gift shopping for limoncello
from John and Victoria's
La Raccolta
whose web site 
tech guru Phil Glatz built
(he loves 
Drupal)
or a silk scarf 
from my Italophillic pal Lisa P.
or a limoncello cake from Jan's
J.Marie Fine Cakes
and 
Ken Jacobs knows
who killed JFK 
and if you need your head shrunken Dino
is your man
and what about oddball Gail
the webmistress (eh?),
and here's
where I stay in Rome,
jam with my friend 
Giorgio Rosciglione the celebrity bassist,
enjoy hilarious, spunky
Luciana Littizzetto,
and there is San Francisco fixture 
Chicken John who cracks me up,
worked (with Murray 
who invented the lightbulb,
makes wifi work, and
practiced hotel room engineering)
for a time at the alas now-defunct
Colex Electronic Company Limited, 15th Floor,
Luk Hop Industrial Building,
8 Luk Hop Street, San Po Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong,
manufacturer of what was then (1983) the world's cheapest
Unix machine (and the price was low, too :-) dubbed "poxy box" by
James Hole
(it crashed 
when you typed
cat),
and here's Fritz Schaerli
,
the president of Adasoft AG
makers of zutrittskontrollsisteme in Switzerland
where I also enjoyed working long ago,
once
modeled the
"...sleek, European-style monitor arm" in the Inmac catalog
(the Sun workstation screen is turned to hide
the error messages),
listened to Frank Zappa
and Firesign Theater
and once had dinner with my boyhood favorite bandleader
Booker T. Jones,
attended the defunct
Notre Dame
International 
high school in Rome with buddy 
Bill Zimmerman,
went to college at
UCSC -- here's
graduation with roommate Nic Nelken, an avowed disciple of
Dr. Bronner
and now a vascular surgeon at
Kaiser -- hey,
one of us made good! --
have always been fascinated by electronic music starting with
Alvin Curran's in Rome in the 60's then
studied with Gordon Mumma
(who introduced me both musically
and personally to John Cage) at UCSC in the 70's and in 1977 at
Dartmouth
with an inventor of the
Synclavier --
Jon Appleton
(with Moog and Syntrophia hat,
with prototype Synclavier in
road cases in San Francisco for a performance at the
Exploratorium
)
and at Stanford with
John Chowning
and classmate 
Larry Groupé has gone on to be an Emmy-nominated film score composer,
and in 1982 I built my first studio
with my then-roommate and techno-wild-man
Michael Schippling,
am deeply saddened by the March, 2021 loss of my little pal
Claire Callahan
in 2013 mourn for UCSF Regent, classmate 
Dave Shewmake
and my childhood music teacher 
Barbara Sparti
whom we lost in March and June of 2013, respectively,
and for drinking-buddy/jazz-loving 
Fred Lewis whom we lost in Jan. 2012,
we lost musician/activist "You Ain't Done Nothing if You Ain't Been Called a Red" Eliot Kenin 
in Feb. 2023,
and for gifted pianist, best-chart-maker, and inspired software geek
Peter Eden whom we lost in the Fall of 2011,
for adored drummer 
Bruce Felter
(with whom the pocket was so deep we
delighted in calling it a trench) who passed on 12/20/2007,
and the 7/7/7 loss of beloved friend and mentor
Joe Podolsky,
the Nov. 2000 loss of
Larry Morehead
the real estate mogul (funny story: unbeknownst to
either of us at the time,
the first building I bought was the first he sold),
and another loss -- on 12/22/2002 my
JazzCamp
buddy
Robin Gilbert
passed away,
and that year we also lost pianist/artist
Kent Holloway 
,
and in early 2004 so too passed away my beloved ex-father-in-law
Lauri Hieta
(I once married a Finn;
here are 
photos
from that happy time),
and on 4/14/2004 we lost
Gosina Mandersloot,
and shortly thereafter we lost
Nameers 
,
and in 2005 was the passing of
Joe Bithell with whose
Silicon Gulch Jazz Band
I enjoyed decades of gigs (no kidding!),
and on 12/23/2005 we lost the extraordinary trumpet player and
lifelong friend 
Robin
Hodes, in 2007 we lost drummer and beloved friend
Ben Randall, in 2011 we lost
'bone-player
Tom Small,
and also in 2011 (July) we lost another cherished American Italian transplant and high school chum,
Lisa Marini Finerty, and in Jan. of 2015 we lost 
Dick Karpinski,
and in that same month we lost my pal-since-third-grade and Romana Americana
Laura Antinucci
whose brother Richard was the drummer in my first (junior high school) rock band,
and I'll forever miss my best high school pal, brilliant energy engineer
Mike Selig 
who passed away on Feb 22, 2011 -- his last essay was his own obituary, and Harvey Robb
in September of 2015
-- and here is 
the grave of John Piccoli (in the
Cimitero
Acattolico 
where
I intend to be buried or at least to endow a tree, managed in part by Heather
whom we lost in July of 2013 (memorial site)
but mostly by
Mandy -- in 2022 the Queen awarded her an MBE! 
(the Beatles got MBEs, too)
-- listen to the 10/29/2011 RAI interview)
who died in 1955 at age 16 on his brand-new
motorbike
given to him that very day by his doting father Nemo the sculptor
(Juanita never forgave him and left me her house but connivers screwed me out of it after a 19-year legal battle...
no kidding!),
and in June of 2017 we lost my Roman pal 
Maura,
and in 2014
Pete Seeger -- activist, inspiring musician,
family friend and, in Feb. 2016, 
Dan Hicks,
in 2023 we lost Burt Bacharach
(whom I saw live in 2017 -- fabulous!),
and in 2021 my beloved seventh-grade Ancient History teacher Hiram Dewitt 
and in 2022 my fabulous Dartmouth electronic music mentor/composer/friend Jon Appleton 
(yes, I mentioned him above... can't do it too often),
and in March of 2022 my Roman boyhood pal (and gifted musician in our rock/jazz band) 
Giampiero Scuderi aka Chirichetto ("Altar Boy")
and in March of 2023 Giampi's brother Mimmo 
(there is now only one brother left,
Uccio, though I was called the fourth brother since I ate at their house so often)
and in July of 2022 my buddy-in-Brazilian-music-joy 
Vaughan Johnson
-- so I have been
thinking about death
lately -- here is a poem about it
by one of my favorite authors,
John Updike
(deceased 2009) --
and here's another: Last Touch
and some wisdom about grief
-- and I hang onto
old friends
-- remember shmoos? 
and Pogo? 
and
R. Crumb? 
and went to Thailand in 2006
to see the
longneck ladies (and my friend
Jason who wrote a succinct statement of his
political values)
and used to go every year to
Carnaval
in Salvador (capital city of the Brazilian state of Bahia,
the 
musical soul of that most musical country),
adore
Gal Costa 
Brazil's top star 
(crazy
hair, fabulous pipes, phrasing, time, arrangements, production,
repertory, and sidemen) who, too, died in 2022
...oh yes, another deity in my pantheon is 
Ray Brown (it's said that when he was
married to
Ella Fitzgerald and they had a fight she threw his bass
into the pool -- but that's not why I worship him),
and in 2023 we lost 
Len Chandler whose impassioned music
inspired boyhood me "...so I guess we gotta keep on keepin' on",
from 2000 to 2003 I made jazz acoustic bass my primary career
often as
a sideman for
singers
(here's my
musical resume
and my
gig calendar
and you can 
hear me in action),
especially at my favorite bar, Specs
and made some
MP3 sound clips
(in my own little studio) of people I worked with such as
Mal Sharpe's
Big Money in Dixieland and deeply regret his passing in 2020, especially enjoyed playing with
Cathy Withacee Felter and My Trio
though for years my favorite gigs were at
Specs 12 Adler Museum (but alas buffoons now run the nuthouse) in SF's Chinatown,
and have compiled what, despite its relentless and interminable
loquacity (and brutality toward
violists -- I dated one once)
is probably not the definitive collection of
musician jokes, in 2004 moved on to my third career (career not job
-- important distinction),
have gotten interested in 
wireless networks
with 
and
am, with my family, active in our local community
(here's us scrubbing the sidewalks 
in our
neighborhood paper),
former volunteer-webmaster for
Children's Day School that Cara used to attend,
visited
my New York family in Spring, 2002,
again in July of 2004,
and again in 
December of 2005,
and the glorious Fourth in Alameda,
and I must warn you that
terrible
things happen when you turn 50,
in 2004 and 
2007 strolled the
Bay-to-Breakers,
in 2007 threw a 
party for Susan,
occasionally cook 
(recipes here)
and am reminded by
the World Trade Center attack to attend to
disaster preparedness
(my ham callsign is KG6OIE)
and, accordingly, have been
programming my radios
-- if you live in the SF Bay Area, you may find useful my
collection of local public agencies
frequencies and
police codes
(in a crisis, know what's going on!) and
Cara and I became
NERTs, and was relieved we got rid of
(click for rant)
Fuehrer Bush
and elected an adult
though alas he worsened the cyber-police state so we need defenses
like the 
FOIA Machine
and Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden are patriots
facing down Fascist
America, in 10 easy steps... too bad we didn't get
Bernie... we got a nightmare worse than any I could have imagined
-- gone, too, now (hurray) but maybe the next one will be Oakland's very own Kamala
-- and I have improved the US
Constitution
but I still haven't burned my draft card
and I propose this 
modest solution
(ahh, to protest in style like the Italians!)
but if you want to date one you must know the
rules 
and I used to visit
Helmut's Timberlock ranch,
in 2004 
Arky is into
basketball and in 2006
he is into soccer
and in 2003 he joined me
on a 
mind-boggling
(and strenuous) sea-kayaking trip in Baja,
once swapped apartments with
Eric
Richmond,
my buddy from third grade (his is in London where I saw my forever pal
Amedeo 
who takes pictures of Roma
)
and also from third grade there's
Johnny Bruckman (funny... he doesn't look like a third grader... :-)
whose Dad changed my life by showing us kids on Johnny's ninth birthday
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (in their
private screening room, no less!)
and I became the tough, silent loner (hah!),
love to visit 
Rick Ackerly's ranch in Mendocino County's Anderson Valley
(the new Napa Valley),
and 
Jeff Johnson alas no longer runs the progressive
Peace Pundit site
(but we love his letters to the editor of the SF Chronicle)
and Karen Ande makes poignant 
photos
of orphans in AIDS-torn Kenya,
did 
silly little computer art
thingies,
in 2007 I finally went to 
Burning Man
and played in the Burning Band
and
in 2016 took my kids
who were astounded... as was I,
and I fervently oppose capital punishment -- barbaric!
(essay by my
brilliant high school philosophy teacher 
Steven Schneebaum) --
and solitary confinement
-- yes, we do torture in America --
I have an opinion
on just about everything political,
admire 
Chris Hedges
and 
John Nichols
and learn so much from their books and talks, and the brilliant
podcasts of Sam Harris 
and 
Holly Shaw teaches us about queens (and queening?)
and I avoid superstition (everyone's got an opinion about food and diet;
few are scientific... especially all this
blather
about "carbs")
and wishful thinking
(Atkins is popular because people like being told to eat
steak and butter)
but research and science reveal that
beans are indeed the
cholesterol-lowering, insulin-balancing, life-prolonging, musical
fruit -- just ask the
Pritikin
program for health and longevity,
have my political heroines including
Congresswoman Jackie Speier whose hand I shook
today
at UCSF 
(oops, tassle on the wrong side...)
and am proud to live in the Bay Area
home of five of the six most-visited websites in the world:
|
Weegee photographs, I
used to have a big nose, and I fret about
growing old, sigh and also about
the longevity of my data CDs,
and...
you noticed this entire page is a single sentence?
