Most of my friends will say that I'm not really half baked. Nor a lunatic ... in fact, I'm a relatively level headed guy.

I've never been very politically active, but as I've gotten older I've found that more things annoy me and I guess I've gotten a little more outspoken about certain subjects.  Everyone else has their say on this wonderful web, so I guess it's my turn.  My name is David Workman, and after living in Ecuador for two years, I've found myself suddenly living in Washington D.C. - right in the middle of the seat of American Politics. Long story. My background is in Broadcast Video Engineering and Marketing, but I'm currently running a Real Estate Investment Fund in Ecuador. I am married to a Doctor, who is currently working as a high-level government science advisor to the United Nations, and we have two kids.

I've always had some pretty strong convictions about certain things.  I am a very devout born-again athiest with little patience for religion. I am an engineer and scientist, an investor, manager and team builder, a capitalist, environmentalist, and a vocal gay rights activist. I believe that humans are basically good and all people deserve respect and dignity, unless they prove that they don't deserve it. Everyone deserves a chance to succeed, but no one deserves a free ride. Intellegence is critically important to humanity and smart kids should have the best education no matter what. I am insistant on ethical behavior and honesty for myself, my family, and friends.

Read on if you want the full, somewhat boring, background ...

I was born in the early 60's on the east coast, but we moved west when I was about four years old.  My mom was a single mother with five kids (I'm the youngest), doing the best that she could. My older brother died in 1969 at the age of 9. At the ripe old age of 15, I was planning to meet my father for the first time in about ten years, and that's when my mother dropped a bombshell on me - he wasn't my father.  Hmmm. To this day, I've never met my biological father (he's probably not alive anymore) but I've developed a very nice relationship with my "step-father" - for lack of better terminology.  What do you call your mother's ex-husband and father of your siblings? Anyway, he currently lives in Hohhot, China. I have one sister in Portland, Oregon, a brother in Lapwai, Idaho, and another brother in Los Angeles.

Just after I met my "step-father", I moved out on my own and went to California. I had just turned 16, and I had about $20 to my name.  I quickly found a job, and spent the next few years working full time, paying for my own apartment, going to school, and sending money home whenever I could to help my mom out.   I did well in school and always got good grades. During my senior year in high school, I started taking "advanced placement" classes at the local community college.  The first semester, it was a huge rigermarole to get registered and I was only allowed to take a few classes because of my age and the fact that I was still in High School and living on my own.  But the seccond semester, they just sent me the regular registration form - so I signed up for a full load of college courses and no one said a word about it. I never did go back and finish High School but I maintained a 3.8 grade point average in college.

After two years of college, I was offered a job at an electronics company that made high end video equipment for the broadcast industry.  I still regret that I didn’t finish school – but it was a great job with good benefits and good pay, and I was tired of being so broke.  I started as a lab tech, but I went through an “apprentice” program with the company and was soon working as an engineer.  I got put on a team that designed a fiber-optic video transmission system (this was in 1984), which was a hit product – over the five years I worked on it, we sold over $100 million worth of gear.  Somewhere along the line, I was invited to speak at U.C. Berkeley about the future of fiber optics in the world of high speed communications.  The class was part of a master’s degree program.  I was about half way through my talk when it dawned on me that I was lecturing to a masters degree class, and I didn’t finish high school. Oh well!  The talk went great, and I was invited back the next two years.

I started doing installations at customer facilities (mostly TV stations and network operations centers) all over the world.  Mexico City, Beijing, Hong Kong, etc. I was also attending some of the company’s trade shows, so they would have someone on the design team who could talk to customers from a technical standpoint, and eventually I moved into marketing.  I moved up pretty fast, and was soon the Asia regional manager.  The company had an office in Hong Kong and one in Tokyo, and I was going back and forth about every other month – plus attending trade shows in Europe and other parts of the world. 

Somewhere in the middle of this, I met my wife in the Hong Kong airport, on the way to Thailand (another long story).  She was in the Peace Corps at the time, based in the Philippines.  We were married during her fourth year of Medical School.

My carreer in the broadcast industry was pretty incredible, but the company I was working for was aquired and soon went down in flames.  I joined a small startup called VXTreme that was an early pioneer in streaming video on the internet.  Shortly afterwards, we were acquired by Microsoft and I spent the next nine years in the Seattle area working on the Windows Media technologies, mostly the audio and video codecs.  I was part of the HD-DVD forum test trials that resulted in the VC-1 codec being included in both the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray specifications.

In 2003, we produced an independant movie called Muffin Man, a "mockumentary" about the downfall and extinction of the human species due to a rampant obesity epidemic.  It was a very expensive but exceedingly fulfilling experience. 

In 2006 we moved to Ecuador to get out of the rat race for a few years - we wanted our kids to learn Spanish and know what it's like to live in a third-world environment (in reality - Ecuador is very "first world" with a large middle class.) I was very enthusiastic about the real estate opportunities in Ecuador, so I wrote a prospectus and solicited investors for "The Greater Ecuador Real Estate Investment Fund".  Now that we've returned to the U.S., we are in the process of selling off the remaining properties that we own in Ecuador.