So you came here because you want to kill me...

There's no way to really get to know someone from just reading a Web page, so the official reason for the existence of this page is to put a pseudo-human face on my beady-eyed net.personality. If I post something to the net that makes you want to kill me, read this page, weep at my ingenuousness and raw, naked humanity, and then lash out at an ugly piece of Queen Anne furniture instead.

How did I get here?

I grew up in Danville, Virginia. Danville is a small city in the south-central part of the state, one of those "nice places to raise a family" you big-city denizens are always hearing about. Here's some general information about the city.

I was not a happy child, mostly because I had to go to school. I hated school, and for the most part school hated me in return. We were not suited for each other. Schools are a great place to learn as long as you want to learn slowly. Thank God for libraries. Things finally became interesting in high school when I had my first chance to play with a personal computer. If there was any hope that I would escape a life of geekdom, it vanished forever on that day. It was one of my greatest delights in life to discover that people will actually give you large sums of money just to program computers. Like Robert Heinlein, after selling that first piece of fiction, there was no way I would ever look for honest work again.

I went on to Old Dominion University to study computer science. College was much like grade school--- boring most of the time, with homesickness as an added bonus, but scattered with random moments of complete exhilaration. I had the opportunity to work as a UNIX system administrator there, and as a consequence got to hang out with some really bright people. I also got to play with some hardware that is scary by today's standards. Imagine computers the size of refrigerators, disk drives heavy enough to kill you if they fell on you, and "high speed" modems that ran at 1200 baud.

When I was an ODU student, the school logo was the swirling "odu" shown here. It became the roaring lion / bourbon stopper logo later and there was some grousing in the student body over the change. I guess the PR people thought that having a lion as the school mascot and not using it in the logo was a waste. Actually, the school's athletic teams are known as the "monarchs", so I think it would have been clever to use a butterfly instead of a lion. We weren't really fooling anybody with that lion anyway; to this day ODU doesn't have a football team. How can you be the king of anything and not have a football team? Besides, butterflies are prettier than lions. :)

After leaving the university, I took a couple of button-down corporate jobs to get my feet wet in the working world. In late 1990 I went to work for UUNET, which was even then the biggest, baddest, doggone rootin'-tootinest commercial ISP on the planet. At that time, most of UUNET's business came from dialup UUCP traffic. I did a number of jobs in those early days, and eventually settled into the job of maintaining the mail systems.

UUNET's offices were then located in a nice woodsy office park with a lake. Spacious offices with windows, wooden furniture, non-prison-gray color scheme... wow, people worked like this? Coming to this environment after years in the corporate gulags made me sing like Frank Sinatra.

Once I stopped singing, I was given the one rule of survival at UUNET, which I followed assiduously. Nobody ever explained what those fat ducks could find to eat in an artificial lake, and I never asked. I worked long hours, as did everyone. UUNET grew and prospered. We took over an office building, routing our enemies, and driving them before us, taking their women for ourselves. Truly it was a great time to be alive. In May of 1995, UUNET became a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ stock market. The IPO was fabulously successful, with the stock price doubling in a day.

The next year UUNET was bought by MFS Communications. UUNET's stock price soared. At the time it was clear that Internet companies needed to partner with telcos to survive, and UUNET had been bought by an aggressive competitor in the business local phone market. I was happy but at the same time I knew it that this was the beginning of the end. Company cultures usually don't survive this sort of thing. The journey to the mythical land of Dilbert had begun. MFS was nothing like UUNET. How would this merger hose us? How many people are going to be laid off? Would our benefits package get all screwed up? Could we still juggle clubs in the hallways?

This tense situation lasted just long enough for us to start worrying in earnest and then MFS was bought by WorldCom. Again, this was good news for the company. Long distance telco + local telco + ISP was a powerful combination. But juggling clubs seemed right out of the question.

WorldCom has since merged with MCI to form a colossal telecommunications googolplex, which seems destined to rule the communications world with a rod of iron. The combined companies have world girdling data networks, and enough employees to populate a small city.

Nearly eight years passed between when I began working for UUNET and the last of these events and it was a fun, if sometimes harrowing, ride. The company culture utterly changed. Alas, the lake, the nice wooden furniture and the pleasant color scheme are all gone now.

What now?

In the fall of 1998, I left UUNET and northern Virginia for the rain and gloom of Seattle, to work with the fun-loving boys and girls at Amazon.com. Yes, Amazon.com, the book and music selling juggernaut, the company that makes desks out of doors, the company with the gravity-defying stock and the relentless focus on customer relationships. I spent most of the 1990's watching the Internet grow and mostly working on the backside of the 'net, hacking transport systems. It is nice to be out from under the hood, or at least have my head under a different hood, that of systems that serve people instead of systems that mostly serve other machines. New job, new pathos, long live the new flesh.

In my off-hours, I continue to indulge in my hobbies, which include developing free software, dabbling with mathematics and number theory, and making music. My current public software projects are working on VM and XEmacs, along with supporting the other bits of free software that I've written over the years.

Still want to kill me?

Here, have some free software! Be happy!

Still want to kill me?

Maybe I'm not the Kyle Jones you want. Maybe you want

• Joseph Kyle Jones, the Hoxie High School alum.
• Kyle Jones the little kid who races go-karts. Aw, you wouldn't kill a kid, wouldja?
• Kyle Jones, the cheerful real estate guy in Sourth Carolina.
• Kyle Jones, the 3-D animation guy. Do we really need more 1980's quality animation now that we're in the 21st century? He must die. :)
• Kyle Alexander Jones, whose personal web page is deader than this one.