Eric Hackathorn started with his first computer before he learned to ride a bicycle. His father was kind enough to allocate him 100 KB of the family’s 10 MB hard drive: one of the first commercially available of its kind. Since that time, he has spent a majority of his time dabbling in all things computer related. After graduating from high school, he started working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Boulder, Colorado. At the same time, he attended the University of Colorado majoring in electrical and computer engineering. He continues his work at NOAA today as an program manager.

Eric has taken a back seat to his much handsomer counterpart Hackshaven Harford. Hackshaven is Eric’s avatar (a virtual representation of himself) and exists only in the virtual world known as Second Life. Together they have been busy designing a public 3-D space to highlight the research NOAA performs. In addition, they recently formed a company “Maya Realities” to explore 3-D virtual world metrics. In essence, helping to gauge the return on investment for companies creating beach heads in virtual worlds such as Second Life.

This web 2.0 participation is personal and does not represent the United States Department of Commerce.

The above announcement was brought to you by a whole fleet of government lawyers.