Lance Gropper

Personal Bio

The idea of my blog is to create a plackard of my personality for the 21st century, utilizing the latest in Web 3.0 technology. This in mind, on to me!

If you have heard my family name before, Gropper, it’s not surprising – I have famous ancesters, and while I’m not particularly famous myself, I am working on it.

My Grandfather was a famous American artist. (I differentiate artist versus painter – a painter is someone who paints something a different color – an artist creates paintings, and sometimes (as in my Grandfathers’ case), sculptures, stained-glass windows, murals, sketches, prints, paintings – anything. He had some great best friends – Pablo Picasso, and Charles White (both of whom were excellent artists). My Grandfather did have some controversy – among other things, he created art for other countries, but most notably, he created political cartoons for the New York Times. Most famous of these was a political cartoon of Japanese Emperor Hirohito.

Going down this side of the family tree – my Father is famous in his own right – he worked for many years at Hanna-Barbera as a cameraman. People ask: What does a cameraman do at a place which makes cartoons – they aren’t alive. Each frame you watch of a cartoon, had to be individually laid on a camera stand in those days, and shot frame-by-frame onto film. While that might not seem so hard, it was very repetitive – if you consider that cartoons like those showed 15 frames per second – that’s 900 hand-shot frames per minute, or about about 20,000 frames in a single cartoon episode – multiply this by, say 50 episodes (i.e. 3 different cartoons over the course of a year), and that’s a lot of work. It was a very thankless job – in cartoons, usually only the creators or actors who do the voices get credit, but their work might only last a few hours, whereas the cameraman’s could be days/weeks/months.

My Uncle on my Fathers’ side is also famous – Lee Gropper, worked in nuclear physics, and Albert Einstein.

Before I continue with my family history – a friend told me about a “Gropper” car – I haven’t heard of such a thing and can’t find one on the Internet.

Anyway, continuing down the line, I next have a Gropper couple who are Cousins: Craig Gropper is a local newscaster – he is married to wife Michelle Gropper – better known as Michelle Tuzee, who is a really popular newscaster today.

Finally, with the Gropper name, my brother, Rock Gropper, works as a videogame publisher – among other things, publishing the Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk games.

One other family member in my lineage was famous, but I don’t know his first name – I think he was my Mom’s grandfather. My Mom’s maiden name was Rappaport. Her grandfather invented the headband. Despite popular use today by sports figures, it really was invented to keep sweat from damaging a hat – i.e. it was worn under a hat.

I have one other brother and one other sister, who are semi-famous. My sister used to work at CBS and Disney as a major distributor of television shows. My older brother owns a company which could be best described as a manufacturer/importer who supplies the 99 cent stores.

But from a personal side, my Mom takes center stage – she isn’t famous (she didn’t try to be, although a lot of people asked her if she was “Rhoda”). But she played a bigger part of my life than anyone who is famous.

That’s where I come in: I grew up embracing technology. My family can probably tell you stories from before I was 10, where I would modify Lego, and add LEDs to it, to when I was 10, and held my first job teaching computer programming. I was raised as a reform Jewish boy, and never use foul language – not because I don’t know it or my religion, but because it has no place in the technological world that I live in. I am not a “nerd” or “geek” (Words which I find highly offensive) – the best description I would prefer is technologically creative. I can’t say that I’m smart, just I have a particular way with computers and electronics which surpasses most people. My best friend calls this a “Lance Effect” – in that he is somewhat technically inclined, but he might bring over a printer that he’s beeng struggling to get working for a month, and just the act of bringing it over fixes it (without me doing anything to it). Then he takes it back home, where it promptly stops working again.

As you may or may not know (if you are not Jewish), when you are Bar-Mitzvah’ed at about the age of 13, usually you collect a lot of “loot”. A Bar Mitzvah is kind of like a graduation from being a kid, where you start to take responsibilites as an adult. I got enough “loot” to buy my first computer – a Sinclair ZX-80 (Which I still have). I then got books, read like crazy, and moved into an Atari 8-bit computer, then Radio Shack, eventually PCs, Apple II’s, Amigas, more PCs, Suns, SGIs, until it could be said that I have too many (I probably own about 55 computers by now).

Anyway, enough about computers I own – at one point in someone’s life, they have to get a job which allows them to work on their personality, and courteousness – for me, it was working at Der Wienerschnitzel. I worked there, and got frequent raises and promotions. But so did everyone else – when it came time for me to move on, everyone there was basically “crew leader” – which was as high as you could go without being the owner. One day, both cash registers broke down – I quickly whipped up a program on my 8-bit Atari and brought it in. It turned out the cash registers were quite old, and were beyond repair, and had to be replaced.

From there, I went to a company who did aeronautical engineering – not just airplanes, but also windmills. I was kind of the I.T. guy. As my experience with computers went on, my tastes changed – I saw advertisements in Scientific American for 3-D computer graphics – one that I especially liked I think was from Hewlett-Packard – the ad looked like a light pen being used to model/sculpt a 3D image of the pyramids at Giza. I then decided that was the kind of thing I wanted to do. The aeronautical company I worked for was just starting to get into personal computers – they used Apollo workstations for years, but got their first 80286-based AST computer, and it ran AutoCAD. One of my tasks was to digitize the topographical wind farms, using a graphics tablet, but my desires in life took over – I did them in 3-D, which was something that blew them away/something they didn’t expect. However, I was layed off, as they hired someone with more experience (and years).

I had a friend who was a head-hunter (Someone who finds people to fill jobs), who accidentally changed the course of my life: He got me a job at a company which does “graphics” and was looking for a computer person. But he misinterpreted these as meaning computer graphics – in fact, the company at that time did not do computer graphics – they did reprographics, and the computer person they were looking for, they wanted to do data entry. I went up the ladder slightly, becoming lead data entry person, and they needed some new programs – some were dBase III programs, another was custom-written – a Microfiche indexing system – both courtesy of me. This job worked out fine for a while, until I got an offer to work somewhere else – one that I couldn’t resist.

I was offered a 6-month contract job, creating educational video games for use by the kindergarten curriculum in schools. I did want to leave my options open with the graphics company, so I asked if I reapplied if they would rehire me, and they said yes. I said I would see them in 6 months. The video game job was great, but at the end of 6-months, I was kind of petered-out, and went back to the graphics company, who wouldn’t hire me at that division – I was hired at their IT department. I left there to seek out the job that I really wanted, but then it happened – another major life-changing experience. I was involved in a multi-rollover car accident. If one could say that at one point in their life, they had the worst accident they ever had or will have – that was the accident I had – and it was on the way to an employment interview I didn’t make it to, and I was tiketed like crazy, and I was injured like crazy. Fortunately, after a year or so, I was just about all healed, except for a permently fractured/paralyzed wrist, damaged cranium, and nerve damage.

The head hunter found me another job he was mistaken about – it was a company that had the name “Media” in it – he thought that has to be graphics. It again turned out to be different from what he thought – it was a company who sold the systems that made the graphics. I liked this job, and spent over 1/4th of my life at it, helping to grow the company by about 15-fold. Meanwhile, I was starting a 3-D animation company of my own at home. But customers were far and in-between. I did a number of logos for famous companies, but what really killed it was two customers in particular: One customer had me design an effect for use on an episode of a TV show, however what ended up happening was they paid me for the design and not the effect, and did the effect themselves and went on to win an Emmy for that particular effect. Another customer involved money – he went around getting bids, and was suckered into a more expensive job with someone else by virtue of wording on their contract. The other guy said they would do the effects that we would do for about 1/100th the price. But it turned out, the price was per effect – not for the entire episode – the job ended up costing the customer twice my price. The customer was too ashamed to come back. These two lost customers lost me together about $150,000 in animation work, so discouraged, I closed the business.

From the computer graphics/video dealer I was at, I was offered almost twice the pay by another one, so I went there. They had a different business model – the idea of selling high quantities of smaller systems versus one larger system, however something went wrong in management, and the company found itself backpaddling like crazy to try to get out of debt. The owner and co-owner helped me move to yet a 3rd computer graphics/video dealer. This one collapsed for a different reason – overhead. They had too few sales/technical people and too many accounting people.

I backed up one step – and started talking to companies who were associated with the 2nd graphics/video dealer, and ended up at the manufacturer of one of the pieces of equipment they sold. This company was relatively small, but they had a series of products which were top-of-their class in terms of bang-for-the-buck. On the other end of the stick, was another company, who made the most expensive products in that class – they were making only a few sales, but those sales were big in dollars. The head of my company approached them with plans for a merger. It was more like feeding candy to the lions. It was more of a slaughter than a merger. We had trouble selling our products, because the other company was stereotyped as being expensive. Loyal customers kept buying, knowing that our products were still the same, despite the new branding.

But the larger company repeated this with an even smaller still company, with disastrous results. Management couldn’t see what was wrong with this way of thinking, but it was blatantly obvious, so everyone started quitting. It went like this (Let me know if something is not really obviously wrong with this): We are going to make a new product which is basically free – because it is free, we don’t need salespeople to sell it, support people to support it, or management of those sales/support people, because there aren’t any. We also don’t need accounting people or personnel – the only thing we need is a large army of engineers costing the company millions of dollars per year, to create and maintain it.

Then the September 11th disaster happened, and the company started to fold completely about 5 months later, because the customers just stopped buying…

I backed up again – I went to and am now working for the technologist/founder of the smaller of those two companies, who is continuing the next generation of that product. I like working for him, because his designs are way beyond anyone elses – you can see it in every product. When I started there, our products were twice as fast and many times more flexible than competitors, then we had products with interfaces on them – working at trade shows, and competitors would say, “Well, we were thinking about doing that in 6-8 months…” To another product that was 2-years ahead of it’s time, to the present – we have a product which is so technologically advanced, that competitors haven’t even come close to dreaming about such a thing, and as far as speed goes – almost infinite.

However, all of this fun I’ve had my life hasn’t come without it’s prices – I am heavily in debt (I had to pay the bills after my accident with credit cards – I was still unemployed, and disability didn’t pay enough), and my health is not the greatest – I haven’t had medical insurance in a number of years, and who knows what vitamin/mineral/hormone deficiencies I have. Still I try to be healthy: I workout, and eat pretty healthy, and take some vitamin supplements. But I can’t run – I have foot problems, and lately seem to be spending too much time in bed.

The future…

I do plan on springing back, but am not fully positive how this will work yet.

My Political views (Keep in mind, these are my opinion only):

1) Barak Obama doesn’t realize what has happened to the country – when he’s lowering taxes on the middle-class, he’s actually lowering taxes only for the wealthy: Yesterdays’ middle class is today’s lower class. Yesterday’s upper class is today’s middle class. A good example is me/my boss. Before the economic crisis, I made almost 3 times the salary that I make now. My boss made almost 5 times his salary. He was considered upper class, and I was considered middle class. Now he makes what I made then (at best), and I make much less. This in mind, when the 2009 economic relief plan was put into place, my paycheck dropped by $2/week – real-life, that wasn’t a tax break for the middle-class and wasn’t economic relief. If he’s wondering why people aren’t buying, it’s because we are in debt and have no money, and aren’t making any.

2) He doesn’t realize the rammifications of 9/11: There are companies and industries that have gone out of business that the public will not feel the backlash for, for up to 25 years. Some industries, for example the movie industry, are operating on 10 year old equipment, that there are no companies that can repair – because they are all gone.

3) The “cash for clunkers” program failed – what he doesn’t realize is that probably about 99% of the people buying the cars are not buying them to own – they take a clunker, trade it in, then sell the new car on ebay for a profit…That’s why the sales have been out-of-this-world. He should conduct a survey for the people who traded in cars at the 1-year mark of the program to see how many of them are “enjoying” their new cars. I did a search on eBay – first hit I got was a 2010 car which was selling (not from a dealer) for $500 below MSRP (At least $3000 above what they paid for it with the rebate – mileage was listed as 14).

4) Barak O’bama saved Chrysler because Chrysler makes the limo he rides in as well as police cars. He saved GM and would have saved Ford, because they make many of the vehicles that the army uses – he didn’t save either of them because they would cause any economic problems for the country – he was only thinking of himself.

5) Credit card companies are going crazy with charges, and there’s nothing the government can do about it. A credit card company that I have claimed a payment was late when it wasn’t, only so they could raise my rate. They then cashed the check anyway and said they never received it. I spoke with them asking about how this gets resolved – they said they review the account every year, after this occurs, and the one year mark wasn’t up for another 17 hours. After that time passed, they reviewed my account, and decided not to decrease my payment. Another credit card company said they are increasing my rates by 5%, because they are having economic problems (The government (meaning taxpayers – i.e. me) bailed them out).

6) Ben Bernenke resembles Papa Smurf in more than one way – when asked about when the economic crisis is going to end, the response is to the effect of “Jokey! Not far now…” I like him, but think he is taking way too much heat from the upper government. I didn’t care much for his cryptic predecessor (Like listening to Nostradamos when he is asked a yes or no question).

7) Despite my political views, I don’t know of ways that things could be better – politics and economics are not my strongpoints.

Lance