Al

Hi. I’m Al Billings and this is my blog. I cover a lot of different topic areas here, which can seem very confusing to some people. This is more of a “you’re sitting in my living room with me” kind of blog rather than some hard hitting tech or political punditry or the like. Be warned.

First off, I’m a professional tech guy. I work as a QA Engineering Lead (aka “Software Tester”) at the Mozilla Corporation in the Bay Area of California down in Silicon Valley. The Mozilla Corporation (which is often called “MoCo” to separate it from the Mozilla Foundation or “MoFo,” which owns it) is the proud creator of the Firefox browser in cooperation with the larger Mozilla Community. We’re also still involved, to varying degrees, with the Thunderbird e-mail client, now worked on by the Mozilla Messaging Corporation (MoMess!).

Previously, I worked at Microsoft for almost nine years doing QA work and, later, customer facing work with feedback and blogs as a project manager for the Internet Explorer team. Back in the early 1990s, I began my career in tech support and worked my way up through being a webmaster at Sprynet before shifting to QA in 1996. All of my professional experience in technology has been in the space of the Internet, Web Browsers, and Community work. I worked on Internet Explorer 4, 5, 6 SP2, and 7 (with a stint working on MSN Explorer and a failed project called “Netdocs” in between some versions). They made me run nightly builds of Windows Vista for years so I only use Linux and OS X at home now.

I’ve been on the Internet since back in 1989 when we had to hack into a local dial-up at the University and work out from there through telnet via intermediate university unix boxes. I once ran a UUCP node, pagan.UUCP, back in the golden days in order to get Usenet and e-mail from the earlier net through a connect to a BBS that became one of the first internet service providers in Seattle later. I also ran two different Seattle area modem-based bulletin board systems in the late 80’s and early 90’s: Revelstone and The Sacred Grove. The latter was part of a fairly large Pagan FIDOnet-based network (as well as a Buddhist one).

This is my professional career and the places where it touches on my geeky youth.

Outside of my work, I completed my interdisciplinary Master of Art’s degree in Humanities at the end of December, 2007. My concentration in the program was Philosophy, specifically in the space of Philosophy of Religion. My thesis was within that context studying Western Esotericism, focusing on the late 19th century “Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn” and its beliefs and teachings concerning the nature and structure of the human soul. You can download the entire PDF of my thesis or preview 24 pages of it online at the official ProQuest page for it.

In the year since receiving my MA, I have taken a couple of graduate level courses on Buddhism and joined the Five Mountain Buddhist Seminary, which is a non-denominational Mahayana Buddhist seminary. My work in the seminary will probably take two years to complete, along with retreat requirements. I am a Buddhist practitioner with a background in Tibetan Vajrayana and, later, Japanese Buddhism with some connection to both Tendai and Zen lineages of practice.

In addition to this work in the seminary, I have applied to the doctoral program at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. If accepted into the program, I will be studying for an interdisciplinary PhD focusing on Buddhism, specifically Japanese esoteric Buddhism (Tendai and Shingon). This would commence in the Fall of 2009 and continue for roughly six or seven years through completion. This would put me in my mid-40’s when I receive my PhD.

I grew up Roman Catholic until my mid-teens and spent quite a bit of time at a Methodist-based church that my grandparents attended. I have a long background (15 years or so) in both Neopaganism and Western Esotericism starting in my undergraduate college years. While I am not directly involved in such things anymore, many of my friends still are still involved and I am sympathetic to those forms of spirituality and the attempts by people to find an authentic spiritual practice that works for them. This previous involvement is the root of my academic interest in these areas and also in the American religious experience, especially in the 21st century. I’m pretty happy, generally, to attend and witness a variety of religious ceremonies because I find the spirituality of people to be an interesting part of life. I am the goy at your seder…

I’m on the board of directors (which sounds grandly important, doesn’t it, but isn’t really) of two small religious non-profit organizations. One is the Buddhist temple with which I am affiliated and the other is a Neopagan organization in Utah started by my mother, which focuses on chaplaincy and care-giving work for Neopagans, especially those who are incarcerated.

I live in the Oakland, California with my wife, R, to whom I was married in 2004. I have a twelve year old daughter from my previous marriage who lives in Seattle with her mother. I was born and raised almost entirely in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, attending the local state university and working for the local megacorp.