This picture's apparently good for scaring mice...

[Kent Nassen, c19754 65K JPEG] yk

Kent Nassen c.1974

Okay, it has been suggested that I put in a little about myself (as if all the rest of the links on this site don't leave a trail a mile wide :-). As the picture above shows (assuming you can see it), I play bass guitar (that's a Carvin above) and have since 1972.

My favorite amp is my black padded vinyl-covered Kustom B200 (100W RMS), which is of course, much too loud for the neighbors. My current (and relatively long-standing) musical interests are rockabilly (The Reverend Horton Heat --that's psychobilly, though isn't it?--the Stray Cats, Brian Setzer, the Blasters [hey, these guys have their first vinyl album--1980--out on CD now! "American Music" Get it!], ), and electric guitar blues (The Nighthawks, The Kinsey Report, Magic Dick & J. Geils with BluesTime, etc.). I also enjoy 60's, 70's and 80's rock, though nothing at all disco-ish or rap-ish 'k? Think Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers, Ted Nugent, Rush, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Blue Oyster Cult, Creedence Clearwater Revival, John Fogerty, Stevie Ray Vaughn and you've probably got a pretty good handle on what I like to listen to, eclectic as it may seem. I'm not playing with any band currently, but I do play almost every day for my own enjoyment.

Just recently, I accepted employment with the Parke-Davis Division of Warner-Lambert Corporation in Ann Arbor as a programmer/analyst in the Clinical Reporting Systems department. I'm very happy with this move, related as it is to the duties of my previous job, but in a larger department, with many new things to learn.

My previous job was at the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in Ann Arbor, MI, where I was a Senior Data Archive Specialist. There I spent a lot of my time on a Unix server writing shell, AWK, and Perl scripts, SPSS and SAS programs, as well as the occasional C program. My main job there was cleaning and documenting survey data collections. While at ICPSR, I presented mini-seminars on the use of sed & AWK and SAS & SPSS for my co-workers.

At home, I run the free unix operating system FreeBSD 14.3-STABLE on my old Dell Poweredge T130 as of July 2025. I run the Xorg X-server with the MATE desktop. Currently, I'm goofing around with the gimp graphics package and Perl 5.40. I use some version of the vi editor every day (lately it's been vim and nvi, although elvis, vile, and vanilla vi see regular duty also). I actually use or have tried all of the vi clones I discuss and show on my vi page and I usually edit my HTML code by hand using vi, hence the vi-powered logo.

One recent non-fiction book I've read was Killing Custer by James Welch (with Paul Stekler) (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994). I'm also recently finished The Mystery of E Troop: Custer's Gray Horse Company at the Little Bighorn by Gregory Michno (Missoula, Montana: Mountain Press, 1994). This indicates an interest in Custeriana, of course, and a certain predilection to doing several things at once. On the fiction side, I recently read Robert Ludlum's The Matarese Countdown and The Matarese Circle. I also regularly read through the series of Clive Cussler "Dirk Pitt" novels (and hope for something new ASAP-- such as Clive Cussler and Dirk Pitt Revealed, and the upcoming Atlantis Found).

I suppose at this point I could throw in my vita, but most people find it a bit tedious (it's at around 6 pages now). I'm published in at least one textbook on management and in several journals and proceedings. My undergraduate degree was in journalism and industrial management (double major) and a few years after that I earned my MBA. I'm permanently ABD on a Ph.D. in marketing, which provided me with a lot of methods classes and theory. I enjoy studying statistics and statistical computing, as a result, which shouldn't seem strange given all the stat and methodology courses I've had to take at the graduate level. My latest collaboration "Representation of Measurement Error in Marketing Variables: Review of Approaches and Extension to Three-Facet Designs" by Richard P. Bagozzi, Youjae Yi, and myself was recently published in the Journal of Econometrics Special Issue on Marketing (89) 1999.

In past lives, I've earned a ham radio license back in the days when you needed to know Morse code to pass (novice, KA0QEQ probably long since expired/retired), accumulated over 80 hours flying single engine airplanes including three solo X-countries, water skied all summer, spent my autumns and winters hunting squirrels, pheasants, ducks, and geese. I've also enjoyed fishing year 'round for many years although I haven't found Michigan very conducive for that sport in spite of its reputation (too much pollution for me to tolerate; I really hate those "don't eat more than X fish a day" signs). In previous employment, I've run Heidelberg K-line offset and letter presses, done darkroom work, bindery work, been a bookkeeper for a business, and a manager for a commercial print shop. I'm occasionally known to brew my own beer; I prefer stouts. If I could brew Guinness, that'd be perfect.

On the Grex public-access computer conferencing system, I wasFIGlet font maintainer and the fairwitness of the Life 101/Consumer computer conference, which tends to be the catch-all conference for anything to do with purchasing and using products, as well as finding sources for goods & services.

Note: cyberspace.org and its grex.org server were deleted April 15, 2023 and that site is no longer on the internet or in operation as an organization. grex.org is a static set of pages from the last grex web set up (which I helped program).

On the M-Net public-access conferencing system, I'm one of the fairwitnesses of the Unix conference.

Initially, I shared an apartment with my wife, Suzi, and two cats, Cricket and George. I'm allergic to the latter two, so I'm not a big fan of cats, although Cricket seems to be a fan of me. My wife worked for the University of Michigan as a network operations consultant in the University-wide network operations center. My stepson, Jonathan is finished duking it out with the Juvenile Court system, and claims to work for at a local video games establishment. He's now 18 (yay!) and has decided that high school is a waste of time. We could call him foolish, but he wouldn't listen. My stepdaughter, Dorothy, and her husband Chris, just had their second child, a girl named Elizabeth Danielle. Forrest is their other good kid.

August 2025: At this point, we have two dogs, Percy and Skipper who are American Cocker Spaniels. My grandkids are grown and some have kids of their own or are finishing college.

So there you have a bit of the past, a lot of the present and a little of the future for Kent Nassen. This is more than anyone will read, I'm sure, and certainly more than anyone will care about.

--Kent

Back to Kent's Home Page
Last Modified: Thu Jul 31 16:23:49 EDT 2025