Henry Halff's Life Blog

Life's complications began to catch up with me in 2004. In a vain attempt to jump start my professional life and to rid myself of mountain of paperwork that dominates my life, I rented an office and hired a part-time secretary, Mary Ann Garcia. We have found that between the two of us, we still c...  read more

Business at Mei was going well in 1998. The XAIDA project was winding down and the Air Force decided to undertake a follow-on project. Mei won the contract for this follow-on in a walk.But towards the end of the year, things took a turn for the worse. The Air Force let their follow-on die a slow ...  read more

After Nancy left, I sat around the house not doing much of anything except running, swimming, and bike riding. One day in August of '93, I got a call from Al Hickey. Al worked for Mei Technology, the civilian contractor running my little Air Force Project. (The observant reader will notice that t...  read more

In the summer of '81, when my year was up, we pulled up stakes, headed North along the coast to Oregon and turned East along the Columbia, eventually returning to Arlington. I returned to ONR owing them nothing more than three years of service in return for the one-year vacation. Around the time ...  read more

But wait, I need to back up. The bureaucracy at ONR, started acting in a particularly crazy fashion around 1979, and my job, along with everyone else's got to be less and less fun. For relief, I asked the Navy for a year off to go study at the University of California, San Diego and the Navy Pers...  read more

My professional life turned 180° once I joined ONR. Unlike the university, the people I worked for had enough of a stake in my success that they took the time to work with me. The division chief, Glenn Bryan, taught me what it was possible to do, and my branch head, Marshall Farr taught me how to...  read more

In the Spring of '76, a friend, Al Collins, who knew that I was looking for a job, pointed me to an opening at the Office of Naval Research (ONR). ONR is in the business of giving out money for basic research that might be of benefit to the Navy. Working for the military as a check-writer was a s...  read more

August, 1969 found us driving through the midwest on our way to a post-doctoral fellowship with Jim Greeno at the University of Michigan's Human Performance Center. We spent one night in the twin Illinois communities of Champaign and Urbana, towns dominated by restaurants with plastic signs and s...  read more

Before I could get started on this cruel and uninformative experiment, Theios announced that he had taken a position at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I arrannged to spend a few months in Madison, running experiments for the dissertaion and to return to Austin to write up the results for...  read more

After graduation from Stanford in 1964, I moved back to Dallas, where I futzed around for a half year or so in an experimental psychology lab at the University of Texas Southwest Medical School. A half year is what it took for my boss, Wayne Ludvigson, to realize the horrible error he had made in...  read more