I know I’ve been on both sides of that question more than once and I’m guessing you have to. This blog is about technology – the good, the bad, the ugly and the just plain stupid. This will be a way for me to vent not only my experiences, but perhaps some of yours as well. But as we travel this creek remember what happens when you are up the creek without a paddle? That’s right partner, you’re headed downstream.

So let’s start paddling. I figure if you are going to take the time to read some of these you should at least know some of my background and experience. Not that it matters a hill of beans, but it might give you some insight on my perspective. It’s been a long, strange trip, but I will try to be very concise. As always if you want more detail, just drop me an email.

I jumped into college for about a year before I got a letter that said in part, “Greetings from the President of the United States.” Been too many years for me to remember the exact next lines, but for those of you as old as I am (which is not that old, depending on your frame of reference), it was the standard heading for a draft letter. I didn’t make it to Vietnam, but spent my military career in Germany in the early 70’s. For my take on that check out my article on Helium at:

http://www.helium.com/tm/588969/rememberedits-funny-think-things

 

But at any rate I survived, came back, got a job as an electrical designer, got married, and started a family. I worked as a designer (doing control circuits, security, fire alarm, and sound systems as well as electrical power and distribution) that I decided to get my electrical engineering degree. Well, this was circa 1979 (now I am dating myself) and you may or may not recall the first PC’s started appearing around 1980-81. My company bought a Hewlett-Packard PC with 8” floppy disks (two of them), a cassette tape drive and a character impact printer all for the bargain price of about $25,000. I also took a computer class. Between those two things I figured out that this computer stuff was really cool and to heck with an EE degree. I switched schools and my major. However, the school I switched to, the computer science department didn’t exist. It was under the Mathematics department. Since I barely survived high school algebra, this made me nervous.

I did persevere and graduated with a BSc degree in Mathematics / Computer Science. I also managed a grade point above 3.0 while working 25 hours a week to support my family. I was jazzed to say the least. Within a month I was working for Citicorp. At the time you could pretty much choose to work in finance or in the defense industry. I really didn’t want to program cruise missiles (that was the development work at the time) so I chose finance. I also decided I wanted to be a manager. Well I got both my goals in quick order. I went to work in June of 1983 by November I had 3 programmers working for me. Our task was to build the first PC based teller system out of a foundation of programming and hardware that was proprietary to a certain manufacturer. This was an 8 bit system that was programmed in Z80 assembler. All of it. I have since taken to calling assembler programming, God’s language. There is nothing you can’t do, including some massive screw-up’s. I don’t think anyone uses assembler any more except for microcode maybe. Oh yeah the abridged version.

I went from there to Vice President of research and development for a company called Techmate and later Orderit, Inc. There I built one of the first if not the first field sales automation software. That was about 1986. Laptops had just started coming out and they were a far cry from what we have today. We traveled to all the Fortune 100’s and trade shows. I was pretty much on top of my game. I met Dr. Robert Metcalf (cofounder of 3Com and inventor of Ethernet) who was very impressed with our product and got us into a pretty exclusive trade show in Boston in 1987. I was demoing Saleskit next to Microsoft and Lotus and across the aisle from Borland. All of whom were big players at the time. That product was venture capitaled to death and also had the issue that big companies didn’t understand what field sales automation was to begin with.

I left there and started my own company – Grate Microsystems. My biggest claim to fame there was developing software that put weather data from the GEOS satellites on cellphones and pagers within seconds of an update by the National Weather service. No big deal, except it was 1987 and no one was doing that at the time. We were this close to selling it to Sprint who blew us off for reasons unknown even to this day (another good story I’ll have to tell sometime).

I eventually went to work for construction company in St. Louis as Manager of their information systems where I am today. I won’t name them as I suspect they will probably be used as an example for more than one of these entries. When I took that job I had a task before me. Modernize their systems. This was in 1999. They were running Novell and even had an old Thomas Conrad concentrator (hub) that was running the old 8 bit ARCNET stuff. Well almost 7 years later and I’m done with that. I had hoped that we would move to modernize or change some of the business processes but alas that looks like it will never happen. I did my job too well. Everything is fine right now and we like it like that. They fail to see the inefficiency caused by still running a DOS based accounting system and in some instances Quattro Pro for DOS spreadsheets for major business functions.

So my friends I was at the start of technology as we know it today (or pretty darn close). I have been at the top of my game as a software developer. I’ve been an entrepreneur, a consultant, and darn near everything you can think of in between and even some fun security stuff. Now I’m a babysitter for a network which is pretty much my function now-a-days. I’m sure some of you work in jobs just like me. You get to read about all the cool stuff other people are doing but you are on the front line at the small to medium sized company (or maybe even a big company) and you’re at the mouth of the creek where it merges with the big river. Everything you do is upstream and some days its all you can do to keep your head above water because the pool is getting deeper. I’m about to take you on my journey. I’m going to make fun of a lot of things and people (because that’s what I do) and share my insights with you. Hopefully you’ll share yours with me. If we find ourselves without a paddle, then maybe we can figure out how to get the motor started. I’m looking forward to the ride. I hope you are too.