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my computer backgroundI've been playing with computers since Jr. High (1977? That long ago?) when we had a teletype hooked up to the Public Schools timesharing system. Ah yes, writing programs in BASIC and saving them on paper tape. Those were the good old days. Then, in High School, mechanical drafting looked like a good thing. After High School, I went straight into Minneapolis Drafting School to get a certificate in Mechanical Drafting. While I was there, they got a Heath PC and guess who got to play with it? They didn't have any CAD package for it, so I spent some time drawing pictures on the screen in BASIC. Whee. I also got to demo the machine to the owner of a small plastic injection mold shop and he offered me a job. So, after drafting school, I went to work for Rood Tool Company in St. Paul. They had just purchased their first Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) Milling Machine and no one there knew how to run it. So, guess who got to figure it out? I had never seen anything like it, but I figured out how to make it do some pretty cool things. Next, they bought an Apple II system to use for various things. I got to create a program for quoting pricing on plastic parts and played around with trying to write a CAD package. Around this time, AutoCAD was starting to turn into a useful thing, so we bought a NEC PC with dual 8" 1MB Floppy drives to run it and I learned AutoCAD. Among other things, I created a program that would take a line drawing in AutoCAD and turn it into code to run the CNC Mill. Fun. After a while, I got bored there and changed jobs to an R&D department in a company called Dynamic Air Inc. They make pneumatic conveying systems there. While I was there, they bought several Apollo UNIX workstations and Auto-Troll CAD software. Goody, new computer and CAD stuff to learn! I became the System Administrator for the Apollo system in addition to being a CAD jockey. When I got bored there, (sense a pattern?) I left and went to work for American Mold & Engineering, another plastic injection mold shop. When I started there, they had one IBM PC/XT (remember those?) in the office for bookkeeping and a Digital MicroVAX running Unigraphics V7 CAD software with a huge raster tube workstation. Wow. More new stuff to learn! That MicroVAX was cool, but really slow. I used to bring books to read during the screen redraws. They got tired of that and threw out the MicroVAX for three Sun SPARC Workstations, still running Unigraphics. More new hardware to play with. When the internet started getting commercialized, I managed to convince American Mold that they needed to hop on. So we had a dialup account and I started leaning how to use FTP, Gopher, Archie, etc... (pre WWW don't you know?) Then, when Tim Berners-Lee did his thing, American Mold had to have a web presence. Who got to build the pages? Yup, me. More new stuff to play with. After Windows NT 4.0 was popular, Unigraphics was ported to it. So American Mold started buying high-end PCs to run it on. They also were expanding the business and getting more employees. They were running several different CAD and CAM packages and I had plenty of hardware to play with. Heaven. In 1997, American Mold moved to the other half of the building. This half was actually about 2/3 of the total building, so they had more room. I was put in charge of wiring the new location for networking. So, throw out all the old 10Base-2 coax and string fabulous Cat5 every where. Wonderful. Setup some new NT 4 servers and go to town. String new coax in the shop for noise immunity and easier changes in topology. Get some 10/100 Hubs and a 10 base switch. Fun new stuff! Of course, you can see it coming. After a while, I got bored. (Surprise.) It took 11 years this time. That's quite a while to work for one company and designing plastic injection molds was getting pretty stale. So, I left. I also changed careers! I became a full-time UNIX/NT computer consultant working for LDSi Consulting Services. I got to play with computers full-time, every day and get paid for it! During that time I passed 4 of the 6 tests to become an MCSE. (Which makes me an MCP.) I was working with Linux on a regular basis and am enjoying the hell out of my new job. I got to go new places and solve new problems all the time. 16 Oct 2000 - Oops - Time for another update. I got contracted to Internet Broadcasting Systems, Inc for a few months and they really liked me. The feeling was mutual and when they made me an offer I couldn't refuse, I took it. So, now I am a regular employee again and this is pretty much my dream job. It's a good sized company and they do Internet/Web/Computer stuff so I get to play with Linux/Solaris/NT etc all day. The people are great to work with too! My title is Systems Administrator and that means that I take care of some Sun boxes, some NT boxes, setup web servers, do DNS stuff and Email administration. Like I said, pretty much my dream job. Also, as part of my requirement for starting this new job, I got them to send me to the SANS Conference in Monterey CA. As a result, I am now very paranoid about boxes connected to the Internet... In addition, after I do some more work and take some tests I will now be GIAC certified. (Network Security.) More letters to add to the business card. Whee! Recently, some friends and I were reminiscing about how much fun the Citadel BBSs that they ran in the 80's were and I decided to see what would happen if I put up an Internet version. So I grabbed a copy of Citadel/UX and put it on my Linux server. It's been pretty fun so far. You can hit it via web interface at http://www.anansi-web.com:2000/ or for the true old-time experience, via telnet at telnet://www.anansi-web.com/. I was also one of the first of my friends to buy a Palm Pilot. What a cool tool. I do all kinds of things with mine. Later I'll probably make a page for my Palm Info. But not now. Ciao. |