good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, parents, friends, alumni, and supporters of the 1997 graduating class of computer scientists and engineers from the university of california, santa cruz. welcome, and thank you for taking the time to share in our celebration of accomplishement, of growth, and of achievement at this institution.

i am proud today to share this stage with our faculty, the chancellor of this university, our honored speaker dr. forest baskett, and most importantly my fellow graduates. i have never been counted among a group of people with more pride than i am with you.

when, over the course of the last four years, i have identified myself as a computer science major, people have often seemed sort of mildy confused. the most common response is, "well, can you help me set up my modem then?"

computer science is the art of learning to make computers do what we want them to. computer engineering is the practice of making computers more able to do what we might want them to. programming languages are a tool we use, and like a novelist writing prose, we hope that our work will create something of value, and use. and like many writers i know, we get a profound sense of accomplishement, not just in the results of our labor, but as well in the process, in the labor itself.

a lot of us knew long before we came to this university that we wanted to study computers, how they work, and how we can make them work for us. many of us have been interested in computers years before we had any formal study in them. i refer to these times as the dark ages of the computer revolution. back when we would dial up to our favorite electronic bulletin board. when we would play games with only ascii text as graphics, when we would write simple programs in fortran and basic.

computers, as you may have heard, weren't cool. to some of you this may be shocking news, it was to me, but nonetheless, it is true. even my loving and supportive father called me a nerd when he discovered the levels to which my interest in them ran (happy father's day, dad!). but he was wrong. i am not a nerd. what i am is something entirely different: i am a geek. a nerd is someone without a social consciousness. i define a geek to be someone who is aware of social pressures, norms, and expectations, and is simply unwilling or unable to completely conform to them. but a geek has his own cool, somewhere, of this i was always sure.

and up here with me, today, is my geek support group. on this stage are some of the best friends i have ever made. we have shared in our common interests, suffered through common hardships, spent long nights programming, together, in the depths of the applied sciences building. i share their experiences here, and i will always feel a kinship and respect for them because of it.

something happened, sometime, in our sophomore year here. i don't remember, now, exactly when. people, i mean real people, not just geeks, starting talking about this thing, this network. they called it the world wide web. on it were graphics, art, poetry, databases of alien abductions: basically, eventually, everything. and people were interested. and over the next couple of years it grew, changed, more and more people began participating.

and something happened to us geeks, too. people started to want to know more about computers, i mean normal people. our cool started to happen.

a lot of people have a lot of things to say about how computers have impacted our society, and have changed our lives. and on this stage, we graduates here, we have a responsibility regarding those issues. computers have and are wroughting a revolution on our society. we, on this stage, are the laborers of this revolution. we are the future architects of it. and along with all of society we have to continue to apply our consciences to this revolution, and try in our way, to improve the world we live in.

computer science is a relatively new area of study. computer science is a young science. the science and industry is rapidly changing, growing, thriving. computer science is our science. we are helping to take it out of an awkward teenagehood, and into some semblance of maturity. i am amazed at the minds i have known on this stage, and i look forward eagerly to see what each will continue to accomplish. this field is where things are happening right now.

i can't imagine having studied these fields anywhere else than ucsc. we have had, as undergraduates here, the opportunity to develop close relationships with our faculty, participate in ongoing research, and get to know all of our fellow classmates. i am indebted to the school of engineering here for these opportunities.

i also want to take this opportunity to warmly thank tracy larrabee for her generous time and energy into making this graduation happen, as well as that of daniel nunes, alana sherman, and pat mantey. its very important to me to share in celebration with the people who i have spent the majority of my time with the last four years.

i want to close with a little lesson i learned last week. i was in an airport, walking by a water fountain. i noticed that it had no button to start the water: instead there was a small red panel. ahah, i thought, its just gonna know where i am in front of it wanting a drink of water. thats so cool. so i walked over for my drink. only it didn't happen. as my sister would say, the fountain wasn't acknowledging me. i waved my hands in front it, leaned down more. it was only as i began to walk away that the water started flowing.

i was reminded of two things. technology should never be implemented for its own sake: a button on a water fountain works just fine. also, there is no substitute for human intelligence, human ingenuity, and common sense. in our increasingly technical, geek friendly world, this is more true than ever.

congratulations, my fellow graduating cyberslugs. somewhere on the other side of this stage is that 'real world' they have been threatening us with since potty training. i only hope i can conquer it with the intelligence, wit, dedication, and that cool that i have seen you all demonstrate at this university. thank you for your time, thank you for this celebration, and well done my friends.