As a teenager from an Air Force family stationed at Clark AFB Philippines during the (Republic of Vietnam) RVN war, I did volunteer work at he hospital. We brought in wounded soldiers off the buses and MedEvac trucks in for X-rays, gathered paperwork, helped them after surgery. Doesn't seem like much for a 15-16 year old kid but I felt great about being able to help others.

I enlisted in the Air Force November 1967 where I was introduced to computers. Although I spent most of my time sorting cards, fixing punch card programs and data, I always enjoyed fixing and improving something - both software and hardware. I had to wire boards to get machines to process data according to detailed accounting instructions. Later I would re-write documentation to make processes clearer and reduce errors. I learned to fix equipment problems after watching equipment engineers and asking questions. I soon became shift supervisor and developed processes to reduce time, improve quality and reduce errors. I received two Air Force Commendation medals for the quality of work I did during my tour of service. I held high level security clearances. The most enjoyable times were working the 15th Air Force Operations doing some interesting computer work where I had the opportunity to not only prepare data for processing but also to learn basic programming. It wasn't the programming that I enjoyed as much as the applications and solutions that were the outcome of all this work.

My final tour of duty for the Air Force was spent at Sunnyvale Air Force Station at the Satellite Control Facility (aka Blue Cube). It was a very exciting time tracking DOD satellites, receiving and processing telemetry transmitted by them, and sending commands to them.

After I completed my tour of Air Force service, I started work at Teledyne Inc as a Data Processing Supervisor. When we encountered hardware problems I took on the responsibility to get customer service representatives on-site quickly or to get them to instruct me to make adjustments. When they were on-site I would then watch the hardware engineers, ask questions to learn how to fix the equipment and assist the engineers when possible. I soon found myself working for the hardware company fixing the equipment for other customers. In a short time I advanced to territory supervisor, technical support and then world wide technical support. The quality of my work and success at taking on new challenges, and the ability to develop strong customer relations are what helped me advance in this career. I worked hard to develop strong customer satisfaction and demonstrate quality service, which made my job very enjoyable.

The reason I explained the above is to show I enjoy tracking down problems, finding solutions and making things work. Although I have done considerable programming, I found knowing what programmers and developers have to do and how, made it easier to communicate with them. So I soon tried to learn things just to understand what others had to do to accomplish their work.

I mostly enjoyed being a Technical lead to develop applications and solutions. I worked with customers to understand their current process and then document them for the developer. Then, from this documentation, I worked with the developers to create automated, simpler, and secure methods of doing the work thus reducing errors, and freeing people from cumbersome administrative task oriented processes. We would then develop monitoring solutions to make sure the application was up and running, and notify support of an outage to reduce downtime.

In one of my positions I was assigned as webmaster for a major industrial computer hardware company for about four years, where I learned about UNIX systems, edit with "vi", writing html, hacking Perl scripts, installed, configured and managed web servers and other supporting applications. I found that web was a great way to make corporate information and solutions available to the world. Again I took on challenges to learn new things and find solutions.

I am currently employed working with a large corporation doing web hosting security work with Computer Associates (aka Netegrity) SiteMinder Policy Servers and Web Agents, and SunOne Directory Server (LDAP) and iPlanet Directory Servers.

In my personal life I continuously work to fix and improve things around my house. I project managed a house I had built, helped frame, install drywall, tape and mud, installed vacuum systems, ran cable, installed windows, doors, tiles, textured, trimmed, sanded and painted, installed light fixtures and switches.

What I am looking for next is a position that allows me to utilize my experience working with customers and developers to improve processes, manage systems, and create solutions.