Roger Jennings

Brazilian, Cuban, Cajun, Norteno, blues (Texas and delta), bottleneck guitar (e.g., Rev. Gary Davis), jazz, classical

One Hundred Years of Solitude, , Innocent Erendira, , Leaf Storm and Other Stories. , The President (El Senor Presidente), , The Gree Pope (Le pape vert), Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Miguel Angel Asturias, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz

Bye Bye Brazil, Erendira, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings, Central Station, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis

Law and Order, , This Week in Northern California (KQED), , Nova, , McNeil-Lehrer News Hour, , Nature

Databases, database design, SQL Server 2005, SQL Express, Visual Basic 2005, Visual Basic 9.0 (next version, LINQ, XLinq, and DLinq), Visual Studio 2005, Microsoft Access, surfing, foam surfboard construction; African-American, South American, and Cuban history; history of the Spanish Civil War.

Self-Employed

University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley High School

Prior to my writing career, I was a classical music disk jockey and studio/transmitter engineer for listener-sponsored FM radio station KPFA in Berkeley, California. While attending UC Berkeley in the era of the Free-Speech Movement, I became interested in African-American, South American, Russian and Cuban history. In 1959, I founded a chemical company (Polytron Corporation) that manufacture rigid urethane foam components for, inter alia, manufacturing foam surfboard cores (called blanks) and marine salvage operations (raising ships)., Polytron pioneered the manufacture of prefabricated building panels insulated with rigid urethane foam. In conjunction with Frigoscandia AB (Helsingborg, Sweden), owned by Incentive AB (one of the Wallenberg family companies), we built panel manufacturing plants in Richmond, California, Hull, U.K., and Joinville in southern Brasil (Santa Catarina). Trips to Joinville (via Rio de Janeiro) hooked me on Brasilian music, movies, and food., After selling Polytron to Olin Corporation in 1970 and spending a year in bonded indenture at Olin's New York City headquarters, I started Fluidyne Instrumentation to supply machinery that processed urethane elastomers for applications ranging from skateboard and inline skate wheels to hollow-fiber kidney dialysis cartridges. One of Fluidyne's dialysis cartridge customers was Gambro AB, another Incentive AB company., Fluidyne also manufactured computer-driven medical and industrial data-access and control (DAC) systems that were programmed by Wang and Digital computers, as well as Commodore CBM PCs. Fluidyne and Abbott Laboratories collaborated to produce the first computerized screening systems for Tay-Sachs disease and sickle-cell anemia., I sold Fluidyne in 1982 and started Safegate Aviation Systems, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Safegate AB (Trelleborg, Sweden), also owned by Incentive AB. Safegate marketed, designed, and installed aircraft passenger boarding bridges (airbridges, better known as "Jetways") and aircraft docking guidance systems for the U.S. market. Safegate airbridges are in use at Oakland International (Terminal II), Miami International, and New Lihue Airport on Kauai. Safegate had eight early IBM and clone PCs networked with IBM PC-DOS and PC-LAN software., After the stint with Safegate, I started OakLeaf Systems to design databases and program database front-ends for Fortune 500 companies. I started with Ashton-Tate dBASE II, migrated to dBASE III Developer Edition, and then moved to compiled apps with Nantucket Software's Clipper. Subsequently, I adopted Microsoft Visual Basic 1.0 and later with early versions of SQL Server for client/server applications. I was a member of the Cirrus beta test team for Access 1.0 and wrote my first book - "Special Edition Using Access" for QUE Books. From that time on, writing books, training manuals, and computer magazine articles became my primary business activity. I also was one of the early adopters of and writers about Digital Video (Mini-DV) camcorders and IEEE-1394 (FireWire) hardware devices and codecs for editing DV content.