Vik-Tor

Location: Albany, California

Occupation: Book Editor/Musician

Family: Wife, Linda (also a musician; daughter, Emma, a sophomore at UC Davis (and also a budding musician).

History: Born and raised in Austin, Texas, but lived for brief stints in Providence, RI; Chicago; and Oslo, Norway as my dad took various sabbatical gigs. Went to college in Boston area, but came back to Austin to work. Was brought up by my physicist dad to be a scientist, and majored in Geology, but after working in that field for a short while got bored and started taking music classes at the University of Texas at Austin. Eventually got a Master's in Music History, then came to University of California at Berkeley to get a PhD.

Had a kid and never finished the dissertation, and was given a temp job by a friend at his small publishing company. That company grew, my friend sold it to a bigger company, and I'm still there, 15 years later: Peachpit Press in Berkeley (we do computer books, mostly on using the Mac, Photoshop, digital video, and Web design). I still keep the music going--I'm the Choirmaster at an Episcopal church in Berkeley (where my wife is the Organist and Music Director), I tune the harpsichords at the University, and I write program notes for various local groups like Berkeley Symphony and Philharmonia Baroque. (Yikes! Bored yet?)

Hobbies: Not many; my day job and music pretty much fill up the time, aside from Halo ;-) I love to take pictures, and spend a lot of time in Photoshop and Lightroom organizing them and makin' 'em look purty.

Name History: I've played FPS games for a long time (I've been a huge Bungie fan since the original Marathon back in the mid 90s) but always stuck to the single-player game or got into botmatches. I'm also a Star Trek fan, and played a few games out of that universe. The first game that ever asked me to pick a name for myself was "Klingon Honor Guard." I was stumped--I have no imagination for such things--and just made up a version of my name that I thought looked Klingon: "Vik'Tor." I've used that ever since, but with joining OTH I had to drop the apostrophe (too many characters).