Personal
After more than 30 years living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I moved to the Puget Sound region in October of 2005, and closed on a lovely 75-year-old money pit house in Kitsap County in April of 2006.
Computers and computing
My desktop computer is an Apple PowerMac G4. It's running OS X and I'm pleased with what Apple has done with Unix/NextStep. My laptop is a MacBook Pro. Not that I'm a Mac geek, or anything...
My most recent proficiency is in LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). My current project is to take that knowledge of PHP-based web pages and make the resulting XHTML dynamic with PHP-modified CSS, JavaScript and Ajax. I'm particularly looking at methods for returning suggestions after each character is entered in a form field, like Google does.
Jobs, Volunteering, and Career
I'm a computer geek. Working in Technical Support and System Adminstration is a fun and fairly easy life. I was recently laid off from Attachmate Corporation, after two years. They have a great product for mainframe integration, and I'm sorry to be away from it.
My previous computer job was for Silicon Graphics, both as a contractor and as full-time exempt. After SGI laid me off in the dot com bust, I had enough saved up to enjoy myself for several years, which was nice. Now, of course, I don't have that buffer...
Sadly, SGI was recently purchased, ending a long and painful slide into oblivion. It was a great place to work.
I currently volunteer with South Kitsap Fire & Rescue as a firefighter and EMT. I'm also the Secretary for the SKFR Volunteer Association. That comfortably scratches the emergency services itch that forms the other big axis of my life.
For three years, September 1998 to September 2001, I volunteered with the Milpitas Fire Department Community Fire Aide program. This is a group of volunteers who provide staffing for community service events on behalf of the Milpitas Fire Department. In exchange, they get training toward a California Firefighter I certificate. I've had my Firefighter I since April, 2000. One thing we did not do was ride-along with the career crews. After three years, and after picking up a part-time job with AMR in San Mateo County, I found that the learning curve with the Fire Aide program was essentially flat, and that I could better improve my emergency service and EMS skills elsewhere.
Education
All of my primary and secondary schooling were in the San Jose Unified School District. My Elementary Schools were Leif Erikson and Merrit Trace. Trace was a gifted education magnet school, which mostly meant I had to make a longer bus trip every day through most of the sixth grade... My middle school was John Steinbeck and my high school was Henry T. Gunderson. All of these are in the City of San Jose. I received my diploma in June of 1988.
I went to college at theUniversity of California, Davis, where I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics in June of 1993.
I have my Associates of Science in Fire Service Technology from Mission College. I completed the units required for a degree in Fire Protection Technolgy in June, 2001. The degree started showing on my transcript beginning in January, 2002.