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John K. Waters was born and raised in Iowa, which explains his nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic and his penchant for cow tipping. (They sleep standing up, you know.) In the 1980s he moved to California to pursue his dream of becoming a screenwriter. One of his scripts attracted some interest from Hollywood, but no actual money. To keep his landlord at bay, he took a job as a reporter.

Since then, working primarily as a freelancer, he has contributed hundreds of news stories, feature articles, columns, and reviews to a range of print and electronic media. He also managed to write a dozen books on a variety of subjects, from computer gaming to California history. 

Over the years, Waters has told the stories of the famous, the infamous, and the unnoticed. He has talked with filmmaker Michael Moore about video technique, Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy about patriotism, former child star and U.S. ambassador Shirley Temple Black about government service, pro figure skater Rudy Galindo about gay athletes, 70s-pop-star-turned-tech-innovator Thomas Dolby about life after MTV, oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle about the rape of our oceans, and farm-worker rights advocate Lydia Villareal about corporate exploitation of migrants. And he was the last journalist to interview the late Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia.

Since 1994, Waters has focused on the information technology beat in Silicon Valley, where he lives and works. For more than a decade, he's had a ring-side seat for some of high tech’s boldest and bloodiest rounds. He currently tracks IT issues around an array of subject areas, from software development tools, trends, and methodologies to enterprise infrastructure; virtualization to network and application security.

To date, he has interviewed a veritable pantheon of Information Age luminaries, including: Apple Computer CEO and savior Steve Jobs; Yahoo co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang; Jon Bosak and Tim Bray, co-creators of XML; desktop publishing guru John Warnock of Adobe Systems; videogame pioneer Nolan Bushnell, inventor of Pong; James Gosling, the father of the Java programming language; open-source software maven Bruce Perens; and uberhacker Kevin Mitnick, among many others.

Waters now spends his free time (what little of it there is) studying programming (he's a terrible coder), frightening his cat with his guitar (he's a worse musician), and writing fiction (hope springs eternal). He loves California in general and Silicon Valley in particular, and would never voluntarily live anywhere else.

 But sometimes, on warm, moonlit nights, he misses the cows.

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