Todd Ogasawara got started with computers as an undergraduate working on a degree in psychology. "I needed to build stuff to run experiments and I couldn't find anything that was pre-built, so I had to learn how to program the computers myself and build a couple simple circuits."

Ogasawara's resourcefulness was a natural lead into computing technology, and a good quality for parenting. "One of the things that I tell my daughter a lot is, ‘sometimes you don't have everything you need, you just got to work with what you have,' and that is what I do."

That may explain his fondness for heroic characters like MacGyver and Ironman, known for their ingenuity. "Ironman is probably my favorite techy superhero…You've got to admire a guy who can build something that can fly and shoot and do all kinds of fun stuff."

When Ogasawara's not watching MacGyver reruns or playing with open source, he's pondering uses for smart phones and Lego® Mindstorms, a robotics kit. His next Lego Mindstorms, despite its microprocessor, light sensors and sound sensors, needs one more thing: "It's programmable, so you can have it do what you want. In fact, you can have it operate remotely using Blue Tooth."

Ogasawara also plays with multiple technologies at work: Apache, Windows, SQL, Ruby, and Linux®. But in his eyes one can see more than just ingenuity; you'll see the explorer. "There is something new and different to learn everyday…It is more than just a challenge, it is the brave new world, a new frontier."

But Ogasawara wasn't always so faithful there would be new worlds to explore. "One of the things that I worried about when I was in college is that it seemed everything exciting had already been done, and I wondered what I would do for the rest of my life, since everything seemed to have been built for me already." Little did he know what microprocessors would do for his future. "The microprocessor literally changed my life."

Now tinkering is not just his pastime or art, it's his mission. Although Ogasawara doesn't see himself "as someone pushing something" or an evangelist, he does feel that open source is in his charge. "What I really do is act as a human liaison between the open source world and the proprietary software world, which is where Microsoft lives. I try to get people to understand that it is not an either/or proposition."

"A lot of people used to think that the two just can't co-exist peacefully. And that is just not true. I think that the moment that people understand that we can get these two kinds of software types to work together is really exciting."

The potential of co-existence is what motivates Ogasawara. Yet, at the end of the day, his passion comes down to one thing: "getting stuff to work. It is not any deep philosophy or deep desire to do a certain kind of thing, I just like seeing things working together, and working successfully, and when they do I am really happy."

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