Born: December 21, 1965 in Eugene, Oregon
Corvallis, Oregon has been home since 1968.
Of course, at this time my most demanding interest is my classes at LBCC. I've finished my first year, starting my second. Web Development and Database Systems is a two year applied program and, as I have an earlier undergraduate degree and therefore do not need to take any general education courses, I am also cramming in the Computer Science transfer degree. Together that is 26 computer science classes in two years. I feel afloat on a broad survey of computer science.
This summer I had a programming internship at K2 Data Systems Inc. K2 Data Systems specializes in programming manufacturing equipment, mostly using a tool called WonderWare. They have also come to the creation of Manufacturing Execution Systems. An MES is very much like a virtual copy of the physical manufacturing process. It records and controls every step using a browser interface with a bespoke database. At this time they are creating an MES for a Mercedes-Benz facility in Vancouver Canada that manufactures hydrogen fuel cells. I spent the summer using Visual Studio in an ASP.NET MVC environment to create the front end. For the most part I worked with JavaScript and jQuery to implement a library of tools called jQWidgets. I also worked in C# and touched on T-SQL.
In the summers between school, both high school and college, I worked in maintenance and construction. After college, with a degree that provided no obvious direct path to an income, I returned to construction. I got my contractor's license with the foolish belief that this would give me the flexiblity to pursue other interests: photography perhaps. Finding my own work and completing it turned out to be all emcompassing. In 1998 I threw in with a fellow construction addict, Joe Zaback, and we formed Peak Builders, Inc. We specialized in new custom homes and did most of the work with our own hands. The financial rewards were never extravagant, quite the opposite, but the work was very fulfilling. Ten years passsed in a haze of hammers and nails, the market went to shit, and five more years passed in struggle and frustration. Eventually I told Joe was going to step aside to learn something new unless and until we found a new house we could sink our teeth into.
Here I am.
In 1984, during my failed year as an engineering student at CU Boulder, I took a course in Fortran. I remember very little about the course except that I enjoyed the coding and hated the process of fighting for time on the workstations. At the time it never occured to me that one might pursue programming as subject in and of itself. Apparently it was in the back of my mind this whole time, because here I am.
