About
I’m the CEO and Chief Engineer at Brain Murmurs, Inc. ‘Soft arts’ refers to my interest in software development and the major Chinese internal martial arts (Taiji, Bagua Zhang, and Xing Yi).
I have been a professional developer since 1996, originally working at Lockheed Martin Astronautics on several different spacecraft including Stardust, Mars Odyssey, and the ill-fated Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter missions.
Since then I have worked with FireWire-based home theater systems, information retrieval, VOIP, and a whole slew of client-server architectures. During the dot com crash I managed to successfully leap from one burning, sinking ship of a company to another, taking on more responsibility with each new job and learning more about venture capitalists, business development, corporate culture, and outsourcing, as I kept going.
After watching yet another great company get slaughtered to turn around some quick ROI for its investors, I finally went into business for myself and founded Brain Murmurs with my wife Lisa. Some of our neater clients include Cray, Nielsen Media Research, and Dun and Bradstreet. During that time we have grown the staff and moved the company into two adjoining offices on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.
I am a closet Star Wars fanatic. I am now very unfond of Microsoft.
Martial Arts
I have studied and practiced martial arts since the late 1980s, first learning basic Escrima techniques from a coworker and then studying Hapkido with Stuart Hamilton at his school in Seattle. Over the next several years I studied with a few different teachers. Eventually I discovered Taiji and Bagua and started studying with Andy Dale and Joel Hartshorne in Seattle. In addition I owe considerable gratitude and respect to Don Scott, Bruce Brown, Bob Iden, and Burke Dowell for their guidance and mentoring.
Me and my friend Guido at Stuart Hamilton’s studio in 1990
-Daniel Pasco