Nepenthes x dyeriana
Rick Walker was born in San Rafael, California in 1960. He received his BS degree in Engineering and Applied Science from the California Institute of Technology in 1982, and his MS degree in Computer Science from California State University at Chico in 1992. Rick worked at Agilent Laboratories (formerly Hewlett-Packard) from 1981 until 2003, where he was a principal project engineer specializing in phased-locked loop theory, high-speed clock recovery design, and data coding techniques for fiber-optic data transmission. He has authored numerous professional papers and holds 40 U.S. patents in the areas of high-speed links and circuit design. In particular, Rick was the inventor of the 64b/66b line code adopted by the IEEE for use in 10Gb/s Ethernet.
Rick plays bass, guitar, five-string bluegrass banjo, Chinese violin (Erhu) and performs with local groups in the S.F. Bay Area. He is an advanced class amateur radio operator (WB6GVI) and a private pilot. Rick has studied the Chen-Pan Ling (Nanking) integrated style of TaiChi Chuan since 1994.
Rick has a long-standing interest in ecology, biodiversity, and botany. He cultivates many exotic and ethnobotanically interesting plants, including several dozen species of carnivorous plants in indoor terrariums and a backyard greenhouse. Rick is a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Carnivorous Plant Society, and is a past president of the International Carnivorous Plant Society.