Kirk McKusick's Family and Friends

I enjoy swimming, scuba diving, and wine collecting. The wine is stored in a specially constructed wine cellar in the basement of the brown shingle cottage that I share with Eric Allman, my domestic partner of 30-and-some-odd years. You can learn more about him on his web page.

It is difficult for gay males to have their own kids; I have adapted to those challenges by helping a few of our friends to raise their kids. This approach works well from my perspective, because I am guaranteed to have kids whom I like (and who like me) - plus I always have their parents to fall back on to deal with the difficult child-rearing issues. I have four sons the eldest three of whom are shown here. All but Ben are shown with me here. My four sons are:

• Daniel Bassak, born August 12, 1964, now married to Trina and living in a house that he largely built himself near Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Here is his brand new truck shortly after his stopped vehicle was rearended at 46mph by a tractor-trailer carrying 76,000 pounds of recycled paper. He and Trina sustained only minor whiplash. You can learn more about him on his web page.

• Ben Cottrell, born January 7, 1980, currently working as a programmer for Riverbed based in Sunnyvale, California. You can learn more about him on his web page. Check out some candid photos of him having lunch, or playing with furniture. Or you can see a rather ancient picture of him with one of his adopted dads.

• Glyn Collinson, born May 26, 1983, finished his Ph.D. on simulating space instrumentation at the University College London in December 2009. He is now doing a post-doctorate at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt Maryland and is excited to be living in the United States. You can learn more about him on his web page. Or you can see a picture of him on a rather Martian landscape in Volcano National Park in Hawaii, chasing our Mindstorm Acrobot, hiding out in a bamboo forest on the Na Pali coast of Kauai, hanging out with me at the edge of Captain Cook Bay on the western side of the big island of Hawaii, or hanging out with me at the northern tip of the Kona coast of Hawaii.

• Tyson Henning, born May 7, 1989, is a student at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. He is spending his 2010-2011 school year in an exchange program at Rutgers University in northern New Jersey. Some not so recent photos from his January 2004 visit: hanging out with Kirk & Eric, goofing around the Disneyland store, hanging out on the California north coast with Eric and George Neville-Neil. Finally, a rendition of the true Ty.

I grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. My father lived there until his death in January 2005. My mother died when I was 21; my father later remarried to Ginny and following her death to Emily. I have one brother, Jim, who is chair of the Honor's College at the University of Montana. I also have one sister, Kate, who is Director of Scientific Software at Crescendo Biosciences. The company is a small startup based in South San Francisco working on diagnostics for Rheumatoid Arthritis and other autoimmune diseases. Here is a picture of my brother, father, sister, and me on a wintery day in Wilmington, Delaware.

Here is a presentation that Glyn and I did at Hackers 2007.

In 2004, I flew to the Mojave Airport to witness the second of two flights of Spaceship I into space to win the $10,000,000 X-Prize. See the pictures here.

In 1997, I organized a Grand Canyon trip with nineteen of my friends.