About

“This is a Very Old version, just a placeholder until I get it re-written.”

I wrote that quite a while ago. It’s 2009 and I still haven’t gotten around to re-writing most this. I should really scrap a lot of this ancient history and start over again.

for something current, check out FriendFeed.

 

This is not my resume. If you’re an employer looking for that, please send me an email and I’ll be happy to supply one.
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My Background, an ongoing story

  • Personal
    • On the personal side, I’m a husband and a father. Hilary and I are blessed with two wonderful boys, James and Robert. We are very much involved with scouting; Both of my sons are Eagles, James, and Robert. I’m very proud of my sons, who are both now also off at college.
    • I was an Assistant Scoutmaster for many years, for Troop 69, and was Acting Scoutmaster during our summer camp (a week-long trip for over 70 scouts) and many other outings. In the spring of ‘03, and again in ‘06, we took about 20 guys on an 80′ sailboat for a week. I’ve also been a Unit Commissioner for three area Cub Packs, and have also run two of our district’s yearly outdoor events (each involving over 30 Troops, Packs and Venture Crews). I’m on the district training team, helping other adults deliver the BSA program in a safe, quality way and this spring for the second year in a row was Course Director for the Scoutmaster & Assistant Scoutmaster Specific Leadership Training (we call it SALT) courses. I have also been quartermaster/instructor of our Introduction To Outdoor Leadership Skills (ITOLS) course, and was on staff for the Spring 2005 Wood Badge course. In the spring of ‘03, I was given the North Fulton District Award of Merit for service to the area’s scouts. I was also the content webmaster for the new district’s website. Here’s my (mostly) complete scouting history.
    • Way back when, I played the trumpet, baratone horn, baritone sax and percussion. More recently, I took about a year or so of guitar lessons, as did James. Robert’s been a percussionist though his middle and high school year and is now perusing a degree in Music Education. It can get loud in our music room, but we’re all having a great time (and I believe that a background in music helps immensely with math, logic, and other thinqs in both school and life).
    • I’m a motorcyclist; I began riding back in 1985 or so and had a few different bikes over the years. Somewhere around 1994, when the boys were at the T-ball/Soccer/Cub Scout age, I sold the bikes in favor of vehicles that could carry the whole family (and all the “stuff” that goes with it). With the boys now driving themselves and off to college, I finally got back in the saddle and am riding once again.
    • Other interests of mine include digital photography/video & editing, reading, learning and teaching.
  • Professional
    • I’m a networking, web & software guy with project managment experience. A utility-infielder of sorts, I’m best when digging into a system and figuring out how it works (and why it doesn’t).
    • After graduating from Centennial High School, I headed west to Lacrosse, WI and Viterbo College. Viterbo had just launched it’s Computer Information Systems program, so after two fine years I had taken all the courses they had prepared and it was time for me to move on. Back home in Maryland, I turned to the University of Maryland’s Baltimore County (UMBC) campus and I earned a B.S. in Information Systems in 1986.
    • Throughout my college years I worked in computer labs, helping students and faculty with both microcomputers (Apple II series, Macs and PCs) and the university’s minicomputers (VAX systems running VMS and Ultrix). While I was at Viterbo, the Macintosh was introduced, and I was even invited to a presentation – I’m not sure how Apple found us in little ol’ Lacrosse WI but I remember it being very exciting. I also worked with an Apple II at my father’s house. We had a CPM card in it and it was there that I did my first serious scripting within the dBase II environment. I bought myself a Columbia PC, and used mostly dBase, WordStar (and later WordPerfect), Turbo Pascal and Turbo C .
    • After graduation I worked in the Administration offices of Wyman Park Medical Center, helping the president’s staff with their computing needs. Here’s a scary story: when I got there, they had four different database packages on their systems… yet were keeping all their data in Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets. I automated many of their tasks, bringing information from the IBM mainframes into PC-based databases (dBase III and Paradox) from which I could create all the custom reports.
    • I went from there to Westinghouse’s defense and electronics center, helping accountants this time. Once again, everything was being done in 1-2-3, even memo-writing. Again, it was back to data transformation, this time running punch-card jobs on an IBM to write data to tape, running it through an HP3000 and finally into a usable format. I used dBase III+ to automate the billing of contractor companies and was given a Software Development award for that project.
    • I then moved to the engineering arm of the then-renamed Westinghouse Electronic System Group, running Macintosh, PC, DEC (Digital Equipmnet Corporation) VMS and Unix networks for the guys who were writing code for our nation’s F-16, B-1B and other systems. In a way you could say that I also worked for Apple as a member of their Support Coordinator program. At Westinghouse, we used DEC’s Personal Computing System Architecture networking software to connect our PCs to the VMS systems, mostly using the DECnet networking protocol. I helped DEC field test the first version of their new PATHWORKS for Macintosh products. On the PC, I was also using Borland’s Turbo Pascal and Turbo C for most of my programming, which included a set of front-end menus for our network and applications.
    • After working with Westinghouse’s networks for a few years, I was invited to support the DEC products that made them possible, so I made the move to DEC’s support center in Alpharetta, Georgia (just north of Atlanta). I spent about eight years in support, helping our customers with their complex, multi-vendor network issues. I quickly mastered the PATHWORKS for Macintosh product set and started widening my scope to help the other support teams as well. A group of us also formed a team to support the various X11 Display Server products which were popular for a short time. As Microsoft’s networking became more prevalent I earned my MCSE (one of the first MS-certified folks in DEC’s partnership with Microsoft). My networking experience delved ever more deeply into Microsoft’s LAN Manager and AppleTalk as well as DECnet and TCP/IP. Trust me, as important as it is to understand networking protocols when working with Windows and NT systems, it’s even more important when working with a myriad of systems from vendors who just might read the protocol specs in different ways. Mix networking software on DOS, Windows, VMS, Macintosh and Unix systems together on the same net and get them all talking — that’s what I was doing for our biggest enterprise customers. I also attended and spoke at various DECUS symposia, presenting sessions on PC networking in general and our family of products in particular.
    • I also was one of the first in our group to see the vision of the Internet, introducing my comrades to ftp, NCSA’s Mosaic and bringing Netscape’s server products to our support teams. As I moved between different support teams (Macintosh, PC Networking, X11 Windows Systems, Unix, NT and more), I was always creating websites and encouraging their use not only for sharing information (team phone lists and the like) but also exploring ways to use the net to allow those “on the front lines” to share their knowledge as it was being learned.
    • As we approached 2000, I moved off the phones and into our newly-created “eServices” group, a part of operations that would concentrate on using networks to bring our support engineers closer to each other and to the customers. As Project Manager, earning a certificate from Boston University, I was also able to keep myself on the technical side of things. My main two projects for a couple years were two sides of the same knowledge-sharing coin: (1) managing deployment of a knowledge-management system and culture that we alled Knowledge Centered Support — a dynamic knowledgebase created and maintained by the support engineers themselves while they’re working on problems, and (2) working on implementation details of an internal web-based reference site
    • I also spend a lot of time outside of work, probably more than I aught, keeping up with new technology, tools and goodies. If I didn’t then this weblog probably wouldn’t exist.
    • I spent a year with a small telecommunications company, managing installation and customization projects before the company was sold to a competitor in Texas. I learned a lot, but telecomm really wasn’t my forte.
    • I’m currently with a small company delivering web-based software solutions to the healthcare industry, wearing many hats. On any given day I may be helping debug C#/ASP.Net code for our front-end, writing SQL scripts to test and/or maintain our Oracle-based back-end, or writing specifications, requirements and documentation for the whole system.

    more updates as they happen…

    …or so I said then. As I wrote at the top of this page, this is all woefuly out of date.