My name is either Thore Christer Swartz or Christer Thore Swartz, depending on what document you're looking at. My birth-certificate says the former while my driver's license says the latter, so my true identity remains in question. I find it somewhat significant and a bit eerie that I have both a Christian and Pagan name; Thore being a derivative of "Thor" and Christer being a derivative of "Christ". With such a juxtaposition of polar opposites existing in one name it's perhaps appropriate that my last name "Swartz" is a derivative of the Swedish and German word for darkness ...

I was born in Stockholm, Sweden in February of 1964. When my parents decided to move to the United States in 1967 I decided to join them, at the age of 3. We spent most of the subsequent years in California, with a 2-year stint in Chicago. I graduated from San Jose State University in 1987 with an Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy. (I was only in Philosophy for the money). After that I moved back to Sweden and worked for a government-run institution caring for autistic children for half a year. I then meandered through Europe and the Middle East for a while before returning to California in 1989 to begin my bright career in computer Internetworking at the then-small startup company, Cisco Systems.

I spent 9 years working at Cisco, taking part in it's evolution from a small startup company to the behemoth that it is today. Throughout that time I honed my data-networking skills to a refined art and often feel downright Gnostic when I consider the fact that this black magic called Internetworking controls an ever-increasing part of the world like some self-replicating global silicon cerebrum enticing people into it's world-wide web, and I can control it at will. Sort of a David & Goliath complex. I go by the title "Network Architect" when describing what I do. Like the Masons' Great Architect of the Universe, I design the inter-connections between the web of digital neurons that span the planet forming the emerging global consciousness. That sounds pretentious, I realize, but it sounds more cool than saying "I build networks".

After nine years working for the Cisco hive I decided to move on to other frontiers. Therefore, in the beginning of 1998 I seceeded from the Cisco collective and headed for the tropics. I spent the next 2 years living on the island of Bermuda , a small rocky outcropping deep in the Atlantic ocean. I continued to do what I did at Cisco - design networks - but I did it in the Bermuda Triangle. So when a design didn't work I just blamed it on the UFOs that frequented the area.

But, as beautiful as Bermuda is, and as much as I loved living there, the time came to move on. After 2 years, I left the tropics behind and moved in the year 2000 to the Alps. I lived for a year in Switzerland, in the small village of Wald, south of Zurich. I worked for Swisscom as a network engineer, working on their MPLS backbone that was built around the country. I very much enjoyed working and living there, and I love the Swiss countryside, which involved a lot of cheese, chocolate, and cows.

But, alas, all things come to an end, and after a year the project was completed and I needed to move on yet again. My next big adventure was to begin working for Hewlett Packard, again as a Network Engineer, but working on the design of their global backbone. So I moved from dealing with an island-wide network, to a nation-wide network, to a planet-wide network. One day, I hope to work on the first earth-to-moon network link, working out of the Space Station.

In mid-2001 I moved back to California to work at Hewlett Packard's headquarters in Palo Alto. We moved back into our old house, sold it, and moved into a bigger one. My grand career at HP lasted a little over a year. One day in 2002, HP decided that they had acquired too many new employees with the Compaq merger, so they layed off 20,000 of their own employees. I was one of these chopped heads, but at least I had a lot of company.

Since then I have worked for Netflix, designing their Internet-video download service, and these days work for Microsoft, working on their core backbone design. So I now work for the Evil Empire, serving the whims of Bill Gates.

On my spare time, assuming I have any, I draw. This I do both in traditional and digital forms. Drawing cleanses the mind and I don't get to do enough of it. I also spend time doing 3D computer-animations. I also look at my rock-climbing gear a lot and remember using it a lot more 7 years ago before I became a nerd, but I try to climb when the opportunity arises. I also hike (having done Half Dome in Yosemite and Ayer's Rock in Australia in 1995), scuba dive (having dived at the Great Barrier Reef in 1995 and at several shipwrecks in Bermuda), and whitewater river-raft (having done the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1994). One day I will climb in Antarctica.

My one big goal in life is to meet Henny Youngman.

(Addendum March, 1998: Now that Henny has passed away I guess I've failed in my life's goal, since I never got to meet the master...)