Like many nerds we know, Franklin's technical life began with the acquisition of a TRS-80 microcomputer, presented to him one Christmas morning during his impressionable youth. Until the arrival of this computer, Franklin contented himself with diversions in model rocketry. The computer, however, revolutionized his geekdom. From that point on, he was hooked. He soon stacked his bookshelf with such tomes as The Custom TRS-80 and The TRS-80 Technical Reference Manual. With the aid of this literature, Franklin was soon building peripherals for the computer. Later, Franklin acquired a 300-baud modem and quickly racked up a $600 phone bill, much to the dismay of his parents (this was well before the age of AOL and its email locks). Although he stuck with his trusty TRS-80, Franklin became increasingly fascinated with the Apple Lisa and early-generation Macs. He learned how to use PageMaker, and began designing his own "cyberpunk/industrial 'zine", Xero, which he has published for several years on a somewhat irregular basis.

In college, Franklin achieved notoriety through the destruction of a PDP-11/03 he had gotten from the Salvation Army. When a well-intentioned girlfriend came over to cook dinner, she unwittingly plugged the toaster into the outlet shared by the PDP. The resulting strain on the power supply blew the main circuit for the entire building! Not to mention that when the power went out, one of the two RL/06 platter drives "failed to yank its read/write head back. When they touched down on the platter, they went farming! They carved furrows into the platter that were a quarter-inch wide! Made a noise you wouldn't believe and pieces of the head assembly were all over the inside of the drive…I guess you could say that's the most expensive piece of hardware my girlfriend and I fried."

Optimistic in spite of this catastrophe, Franklin's technical prowess continued to grow. He soon gained the title of "The Student Most Hated by User Services" while attending Lehigh University in PA. The reputation was earned on account of some incidents involving the school's DECsystem-20, for which he was "allegedly" responsible. The unfortunate situation led to the termination of Franklin's scholarship. However, it only seemed to fuel his passion for computing. He later became an expert in Adobe Photoshop for one of his first jobs. This led to the establishment of his design and consulting business. Today, Franklin devotes about half his day to advertising design and photographic manipulation. He dedicates the remaining hours to "running cables, building networks, teaching Photoshop, QuarkXPress, Illustrator and the basics of color theory, printing, trapping and image manipulation". Almost all of his clients are in the advertising or graphic arts industries.

When he's not serving clients, Franklin is deep into his own coding. Some of the cooler programming libraries he's dabbled with are a cross-platform Mac/Windows Rapid Application Development environment called REALbasic: a cross between C++ and Visual Basic. He recently faced one of his worst programming snafus when he tried to create a cross-platform Windows/Macintosh game in Microsoft's cross-platform edition of Visual C++: "God, what a nightmare! There ought to be a law against the kinds of things Microsoft does with its C-compiler!" What did he learn from this disaster? "Don't use Visual C++: CodeWarrior is much better."

When he's not coding, Franklin designs erotic playthings of the high-tech variety. There's a model that can be triggered by a pocket pager, assorted radio-controlled knick-knacks, and even a toy that's touch-activated (he better keep that one tucked away)! When he's not satisfying the masses with such paraphernalia, Franklin dabbles in fine art and portrait photography. Lately he's been experimenting with kite-based aerial photography, which yields interesting results as long as the kite doesn't get grounded in Franklin's muddy backyard.

Franklin upholds Photoshop's guru Kai Krause as his nerdly ideal, and has met the legend at several Mac expos in San Francisco. "[Kai] has created some of the most interesting graphics tools ever developed for Photoshop, and put the 'weird' in user interface while he was at it!" When he's not walking in the footsteps of great nerds who have preceded him, Franklin dreams of sailing on a yacht through the Mediterranean (trusty pager in hand - or pocket more likely). He would like to be remembered as "that Nerd of the Week with the Ferrari - the one who used to date Peta Wilson".

While we can help out with the first part of that wish, we rely on Franklin to supply the remainder of that fantasy. After all, he's the one in the wish fulfillment business!