about

education:
My earliest memories are of passing time in the car on family road trips by making up number games in my head. Only when I got older did I realize I had been re-creating the Fibonacci sequence, factorials, and all things combinatorial. As an intern at IBM (where my parents met and my dad career’ed), I learned about the practical side of my pastimes and eventually majored in math at Colgate then studied as a doctoral student in Computation and Applied Mathematics (I published the very first web pages for the department at the dawn of the web!) at Rice University.

career:
As a newly minted PhD, I was hired by ILOG in 1997 as a consultant. ILOG was acquired by IBM in 2009, and so I came full circle, to be an IBMer once again.

IBM laid me off in a “Resource Action” in 2018 by eliminating my job. My managers, team, and colleagues were all sad to see me leave. After attending a 12-week Data Science Bootcamp at General Assembly in Atlanta, I started work as a Senior Support Engineer at Gurobi, working with people from the “old days” at ILOG.

I have telecommuted since 1996 — which probably predates the coining of the term (though my dad telecommuted in the ’80s with a coupler). Not only did I finish my PhD from a thousand miles away, I always worked from home with managers in California, Seattle, Germany, Paris, and other parts of France…

blogging:
I’ve been blogging since 1998. This latest incarnation of my blog, GobbledyGoon, was a chronicle of the music, travel, and parenting adventures of me, Gwyneth aka GBK Gwyneth, and my two girls, now aged 22 and 18. As they’ve gotten older and moved from homeschooling to public school (and now college!) the focus of my life and blog has shifted as well. I love to be on the go, whether visiting old favorites or discovering new places.

In 2011, life changed quite a bit as we downsized to a two-bedroom condo in downtown Decatur, GA, and Chloe then Camille started attending public school. Our travel plans have morphed since the move as we work to balance school schedules and our travels… but traveling is in my blood, and I’ll continue to hit the road or friendly skies whenever possible.

Now that we no longer travel as often and I no longer keep up with our kids’ music blog, I’ve had a bit of time to consider what “I want to do with the rest of my life”. As such, the Happiness Project posts have been increasing in frequency as I change the focus of my life’s journey. I’ve started volunteering for the Red Cross, hiking at Arabia Mountain, spending time at our Cape Cod cottage, and decluttering the messes that accumulated in our years of homeschooling.

other:
If you’d like to follow along in our adventures, please see my:

• connections: photos, tweets, blogs, celebrations and more.
• read books list; I go through easily identified phases in my reading.
• kids’ music blog, Gooney Bird Kids. (No longer being updated.)
• Want to reach out? I’m all ears: gwyneth AT butera DOT org