Short Biography

I was born Doran Lynn Barton on April 26, 1972, in Salt Lake City, Utah. My parents, William and Karen Barton, were both born and raised in the Salt Lake valley. My father was a businessman with a strong interest in local politics. My mother had worked at a bank when I was born but when I was three years old she and her brother started a restaurant.

I grew up in a small town called Granger, on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley and attended elementary, junior high, and high school there. My parents owned a liberal amount of land which my father had partially inherited. On the land were two houses: ours and a house my great-grandfather had built. My parents had converted that house into a duplex and rented it. In addition to the houses there was a large barn, a big garden, and a huge field. Our family raised cows, horses, sheep, rabbits, pigeons, and chickens.

To the south was a huge alfalfa field. The nearest home in that direction was about 1/3 mile away.

In 1980, Granger was incorporated with two other towns to become West Valley City.

When I was a little boy, I wanted to be a weatherman when I grew up. When the evening news was on television and the weather report was being done, I would run into the other room and grab an encyclopedia with a map in it and run back to the TV so I could emulate the weatherman pointing at the weather map.

In time, I got a variety of weather recording instruments such as thermometers, rain guages, and barometers. I even got to meet my favorite weatherman, Mark Eubank, who got to know me on a first name basis. Mr. Eubank got me enrolled in the Intermountain Weather Network and I would submit daily weather reports.

I was a late talker (I didn't talk until I was close to three years old) and my mother suspected I had a hearing loss. She expressed her concerns to my doctors. The doctors would ask me to repeat phrases like "hot dog" and "ice cream" and after I did they told my mother her suspicions were unfounded.

When I was five years old, however, one ear-nose-throat doctor had the novel idea of putting me inside a booth where I could not see who was talking to me. This time, when they asked me to repeat words for them I did not because I could not read their lips. Further testing revealed I had a 45 to 65 decibel loss in both ears. I was fitted with hearing aids to help compensate for my hearing loss.

I became interested in computers when I was nine years old. I took two BASIC programming classes at that time- one on Commodore VIC 20s and one on Atari 8-bit computers (Atari 800/400). When I was 11, my parents purchased an Atari 800 computer for me. Using this computer, I taught myself how to program in BASIC and how to create simple computer graphics.

When I hit the more turbulent of my teenage years, my interest in computers took a back seat to my interest in music. From the time I was 13 until I was 17, a lot of my spare time was spent playing, composing, and recording music.

My friends and I wanted badly to be in a band, but only a couple of us had any real instruments. So, instead we dreamed. We had album covers designed long before any real songs were written. But, nonetheless, it was fun.

In 1989, I moved to Cache Valley, Utah and lived with my sister in Hyrum. There I completed high school at Mountain Crest High School and started taking classes at Utah State University during my senior year of high school.

Approximately three quarters into school, a friend introduced me to the school's VAX system, which handled all the student and faculty electronic mail and was, for most on-campus users, the school's link to the Internet. I picked up VAX/VMS almost instantaneously and became a source of VAX/VMS information for other students. In my sophomore year, I decided to write a manual for the VAX system since USU's computer services office admitted to not have the time or the money to spend on producing better documentation for their system. Since that time, I have developed an ongoing interest in technical writing.

I occasionally took breaks from school to apply the skills I have learned in the real world. For six months in 1992, I taught classes on Unix, C programming, networking, and data communications for a company called Datawise, in Salt Lake City. During the Spring and Summer of 1993, I worked for Saddleman, Inc. in Logan, as a Unix system administrator. During that summer I began teaching at Bridgerland ATC as an instructor of computer-related classes. During the Spring of 1994, I worked at Spillman Data Systems, in Logan. From the Spring of 1994 until the Fall of 1994, I was the MIS manager at Vertical Technologies, in Sandy, Utah. Then, I was working at DOD Electronics in Sandy- doing Unix system administration and database programming.

After all that time in the real world (which I used to pay back all my debts), I was ready to go back to school and again persue my bachelors degree.

During the time I was working in Salt Lake City, I married Christine Nielsen

Christine and I met during the Winter of 1994. We met online. She and I found ourselves in a group chat session on the VMS system at Utah State University. Eventually everyone in the chat session left except me and Christine. We exchanged some of the typical get-to-know-you-isms common of electronic communication ("So... Just how wild are you? Ever toilet papered a house?") and then continued to send e-mail to each other over the next six weeks.

After sending e-mail for a while, we finally met in person on campus. It was an uncomfortable meeting because Christine was in the middle of studying for a biology exam and wasn't up to meeting new, strange men and I... well, I just couldn't get over her looks.

On our first date, I picked up Christine after her math class was over and we went down to a small italian restaurant in Logan called La Patiserrie for lunch. We both had Ravioli. During our lunch, I discovered that her grandparents lived in Hyrum- right across the street from my sister. Because I lived with my sister while in high school, I had gotten to know Christine's grandparents well. In fact, we discovered I knew more about the goings-on in her family than she did!

Christine and I got married on December 16, 1994. Then, in September of 1995, she moved back to Logan with me and resumed her education at USU as a computer science major. She has always been a diligent student and graduated in March 1998 with a bachelor degree.

In May 1998, Christine and I bought a house in Hyrum, Utah for the purpose of investing our money instead of throwing it away in rent. This new home included two bedrooms, one bathroom, a two car garage, a spacious kitchen, vaulted ceilings, and a full unfinished basement.

We went to work immediately on finishing the basement and fixing up the yard. I had a sprinkler system and sod in the front yard before October and used my framing, sheetrocking, and painting skills to furnish us an office in the basement by January 1999. During the Summer of 1999, I extended the sprinkling system into the backyard and put in a yard and fencing.

On 31 August 1998, my wife and I had the unique pleasure of meeting our first child, Maya Louise, who has caused us every emotion possible since then.

Since July 1998, I've been working at Sorenson Vision, Inc. as their webmaster and operating my company, Iodynamics, when I can.