About Gordon Brown
Gordon Brown was born Gordon M. Lacks in Los Angeles in 1950. He considers his most formative childhood influence to be that of his father, George M. Lacks (1910-1960), a photojournalist who was felled by a massive heart attack when Gordon was not quite ten years old. In 1962 Gordon took the surname of his adoptive father, Kenneth G. Brown (1922-2005). In 1973 he graduated cum laude from San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge) with a Bachelor of Arts in Earth Science. He worked as a cartographer and geotechnical illustrator from 1973 to about 1981.
Tiring of his work in the geotechnical and civil-engineering industries, Gordon returned to school in his early thirties to pursue one of his first loves: the study of philosophy. Following three years of graduate study at the University of California, San Diego, Gordon took a position as Adjunct Professor of Philosophy in the Grossmont-Cuyamaca Community College District in east San Diego, where he taught courses in symbolic logic, critical thinking, and introductory philosophy from January 1988 through June 2005.
Gordon has also been involved in the radio industry since October 1986, when he joined the staff of announcers at KFSD-FM 94.1, a classical-music station broadcasting on the most powerful signal in San Diego County at 100,000 watts. Gordon worked regularly as an announcer there until the station's demise in January 1997. In August 1998 he secured a position with the Astor Broadcast Group, which maintained the classical stations KFSD-FM 92.1 and KFSD-AM 1450 in San Diego's North County until February 2007. During that time Gordon produced and hosted, or co-hosted, four programs, including Fridays Live at the Museum and Past, Tense! Alternative Music of the Last 100 Years. For several seasons Gordon also produced and co-hosted the San Diego Chamber Orchestra Radio Program with the Orchestra's artistic director and conductor, Donald Barra. In 1998 Gordon proposed to the Astor staff that they consider a live program of classical listener requests. The suggestion germinated, and Listener Request Friday, which Gordon produced and hosted weekly, became a staple of KFSD's programming for over eight years. For a time Gordon continued to work for the Astor Broadcast Group, where he wrote public-service announcements and maintained the Group's website at Financial News & Talk radio, until the Astor Group collapsed under financial pressure in May 2015. (You can hear samples of Gordon's work by visiting the Odds'n'Ends page.) Gordon's voice can also be heard on XLNC1-FM, a classical station broadcasting in San Diego and northern Baja California, Mexico at 104.9 FM.
Gordon maintains a long-standing interest in programming computers, which he has pursued at the hobbyist level—and sometimes beyond—for more than 35 years. An entirely self-taught programmer, he began in 1978 by writing a program to perform earthwork estimation on a Hewlett-Packard 97 programmable calculator. The program was subsequently adopted for use at VTN in Orange County, a civil-engineering firm where he worked at the time. After working through several dialects of the BASIC programming language, Gordon has programmed extensively in C, C++, and C# since 1988. In 2006 he added the technologies of XHTML, CSS, XML, JavaScript, and PHP programming for Web development. In early 2010 he began a foray into functional languages by studying Scheme and Haskell, the latter of which has rapidly become one of his favorite languages. Gordon's current languages of choice are Haskell and C++ (as well as exploiting the cool functional features of JavaScript and Swift, the Apple Corporation's new proprietary language for OSX and iOS development). He occasionally uses third-party software such as the jQuery JavaScript library, but prefers to write his own code wherever he deems appropriate—most likely when he's not "reinventing the wheel." When he's not building a website to order, he's currently preoccupied with expanding his repertoire in order to develop native mobile applications for iOS using Swift, and possibly the C++-based Qt package for Android and other mobile platforms.
Gordon's interests are almost too varied and wide-ranging to be recounted here. In addition to computer programming and website design and development, his hobbies include reading and writing philosophy, studying mathematics and symbolic logic, and collecting classical-music and jazz recordings. He is also a committed vegetarian and animal rights advocate who has developed the website for ADAPTT, an organization based in Michigan. As of 2012, his most recent personal web project consists of inventing and documenting the Extended-Range Secular Calendar, a reform calendar that he has proposed to replace the Gregorian Calendar. Gordon's plans for the distant future also include finishing two volumes of philosophy begun long, long ago, titled Taking Speciesism Seriously and The Most Wretched, the Most Scabrous and Vile, the Most God-Awful Argument of All: A Contest. When he really needs to unwind, Gordon rides his bike for about 70 miles each week, and goes contra dancing regularly. Gordon is divorced, but lives happily in San Diego with his cat Xanthe.