The promised bio

[Doug Loss <dloss@csrlink.net>]

Ok, folks, here's the bio I said I'd post.  This is fair warning--you
should stop reading now if you really don't care about my background.

I'm 46 (47 at the end of this month) years old and live just outside of
South Williamsport, PA, in north-central Pennsylvania, a northeastern
state in the USA.  I have a wife and a 7 year old son at home, with two
stepchildren in their 20s living in Boston.  My wife Sophia owns and
runs a very small (essentially a one-woman operation) Greek restaurant
in Williamsport.

South Williamsport is the home of Little League baseball, a world-wide
organization of baseball leagues for children from 6-12 years old.  The
World Series is held about a mile from my house every August, which
usually means an extra 30-45 minutes to my drive home from work for that
week.

I'm Pennsylvania Dutch by ancestry, which isn't actually Dutch but
Schwabian German by culture.  My grandfather, father, one uncle and a
cousin are (or were) all ministers in the Methodist church (well, my
cousin is Lutheran, but we're broad-minded :-) ).  I've recently joined
the Orthodox church at my wife's urging, in large part to present a
consistent set of teachings to my son.

My wife was born in Williamsport, but was raised on the island of
Karpathos, between Crete and Rhodes.  We'll be vacationing there this
August from the 6th to about the 20th; if anyone on this list is
interested in stopping by to say hello, contact me directly and we'll
work out a rendezvous.

Before I helped get seul-edu started, I was a long-time (20+ years)
participant in the Asimov Seminars <http://www.asisem.org>.  For the
last 5-6 years, I was the principal and eventually only organizer of the
Seminars.  By last summer I'd pretty much "burned out," and since there
weren't any volunteers to take the job on the Seminar ended.  I'm
currently in the process of trying to simultaneously convert the Seminar
from a physical to a virtual, on-line Seminar and to pass the
responsibility for that to someone else.  I have a volunteer for the
task for whom I've agreed to act as mentor for the first year or so, but
she hasn't been in contact with me for a few weeks now, so I'm not sure
if it will actually fly.

I've been an avid science fiction reader for many years (since at least
the early 60's).  Many of my lasting friendships are with people I've
met through their shared interest in SF literature.

I'm also a long-time player and designer of simulation games.  This
includes but isn't limited to games that simulate various historical
military battles; such games are commonly called "wargames."  I've
helped test a simulation of the US/Russian space race and a simulation
of the campaigns of Frederick the Great.  Some of you may know of the
economic simulation I designed, Alterra
<http://cran.seul.org/~dloss/alterra.html>.  This may be something
seul-edu can eventually develop for scholastic use, although I'm not
pushing it at the moment as we have more basic things to attend to.

In conjunction with a Parisian friend I've designed the core of a game
system intended to simulate 20th-century military operations at a
company level (approximately 200 men).  We intend to try to do something
new with this by setting up a website and publishing what we've done so
far under the OPL <http://www.opencontent.org>, and trying to run the
game development analogously to an open source software project.  We'll
see where that goes.  Currently I don't seem to have much time to get
this project off the ground.

That's about it for me for now.  If anyone wants me to expand on any of
the above, just ask.

-- 
Doug Loss                 A life spent making mistakes is not only
Data Network Coordinator  more honorable, but more useful than a
Bloomsburg University     life spent doing nothing.
dloss@bloomu.edu                G. B. Shaw