I realized one day that I needed to find a new job. It was early 1996 and I'd been with PG&E for about 5 years. It was clear that deregulation was going to eliminate ratepayer funded Utility R&D - and since that was where I worked, if I wanted to avoid working with really high voltage (12000 or 21000 volts) I should probably look around. While out photo shooting day around the Benicia Bridge (where I got some shots of the Glomar Explorer - a subject for another post sometime) I had the realization that my Navy background and love of the sea - and my deep skills in software development, data acquisition, networking and instrumentation - made me ideal for work in oceanography.
When I went home I logged onto the Internet (dialup, 33kbaud, to crl.com) and did a search. I found a listing for a job with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on the brand new Research Vessel Atlantis. I was so excited I drove to Costco to buy a fax machine to send my resume right away.
A few days later they called me and set up an interview with the Director of the Deep Submergence Lab Barry Walden. The interview started unlike any I have ever had.
"Are you any damn good?" he asked. His first words to me, literally.
"Yes, I am" I answered.
"OK, you're hired."
I was a bit stunned. I was silent.
"Oh, I guess I better ask you some questions" he continued. He grilled me on Linux, RS-485 communications, networking, data acquistion, and on some oceanographic equipment that I'd read up on but had to admit little practical experience (we'd used some of it on my Navy submarine, but that was not my specialty). He commented that HR would be in touch and that they would probably fly me out for an in-person interview. We cordially ended the phone call and I felt good about it.
A few days later I got home late and found a large manilla envelope in my mailbox. Inside was a ticket to get me to Pascagoula Mississippi - 15 days later! And a nice letter with "Welcome to Woods Hole" kind of language.
I woke up at 5am to call the East Coast when they opened. "Are you offering me a job?" I asked, stunned.
"Oh yes, can you meet the ship when it leaves the shipyard?" she asked. I mumbled that I would try.
Of course, I did. I sold everything I owned except what would fit in a 5x5 foot storage unit and two huge duffel bags. I sold my car, found a tenant for my condo, gave my cat back to my ex-wife, and got on a plane.
And began a great year of adventure. When I got to the ship all the computers were still in their factory shipping boxes. Huge unterminated cable bundles were looped on the floor spooling up into the overhead (ceiling for you landlubbers) in every space (room). Nothing was hooked up. I was deeply involved in every aspect of the bring-up of the entire data system. I was in heaven.
I lived onboard for 4 months, then got 2 months vacation. Then repeat. I went from Missippi around Florida, to New York Harbor (sailing past the Statue of Liberty was HUGE life thrill), to Alexandria (where I got to see the Picasso exhibit at the National Gallery and then bar hope through Georgetown until far too late), a month in Woods Hole, Bermuda, the Azores, Barbados, a trip through the Panama Canal that I took vacation during much to my regret, San Diego, Manzanillo Mexico, Astoria Oregon... and I was in the water ever day helping to launch the Alvin. I wrote code to make science gear work. I ran the ships network. I made the Linux boxes sing. And most importantly, I ran the system that got email across the Inmarsat Satellite. I owned everything on the ship that a normal sailor would not. If it didn't look like it belonged on a ship, I was probably the guy who had to make it work with whatever funky gear the monthly science team would bring on-board.
I met amazingly fascinating Scientists who are digging into the puzzles of alien life on Earth. Entire ecosystems live around underwater volcanoes - no light, therefore no photosynthesis. Temperatures above 500F. Pressure that would crush a human. But life thrives there - crabs, tube worms, clams, shrimp, on down to bacteria. How? It was fascinating. The amazing Scientists studying the geology, biology, chemistry... they were fascinating themselves. They were all among the very elite of the smart Scientists that had those interests - they had to be. Competition for time on Alvin was intense.
It was one of the best years of my life. If we ever have an adult beverage together I can tell you more stories - especially about the large amount of adult beverages I consumed that year (merchant marines and the Alvin crew - two groups who definitely know how to PARTY). But then I met Erin, and fell madly in love, and walked away from all that... and now we have two great kids and a great life and I make a LOT more money than they pay for research science. I'm happy for both transitions: that I got to experience it, and that I found my next life and family.
But it was a great year, and it's a great story. I hope it made you smile. It sure made me smile remembering it all.
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( 3 / 177 )The Giants lost a stinker to the Dodgers tonight - and they deserved to. You can't load the bases that many times, fail to score, and expect to win. You just can't. And the bullpen collapsed again in the 9th. I just hope this isn't a sign of how the season will play out. I'm an eternal optimist though. I still say good pitching will beat good hitting.
On a different note, I'm using Twitter now. I'm a johnny-come-lately to that too, but for the longest time I just didn't see the point in sending text messages to the world that I was going to get a coffee, or head home, or whatever. For one thing, why pay for all those messages? But twitter can be a form of an alert service of sorts - you can choose how often you send tweets - and send them from a web-enabled device or your PC and not via SMS. I think it's becoming a key part of the new Internet.
I've used LinkedIn for quite a while now. It's been more than useful to stay in touch and make contact with folks I needed in business. It's to business what Facebook is to friends.
These three - Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook - seem to me to be the bases loaded. Blogging is the base hit that brings those runs home. Unlike the Giants tonight, I'm not going to waste the opportunity.
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( 3 / 153 )I've threatened to start blogging for a long time and now I've gone and done it. I gave up on my grand plans for a new server with virtual machines running clean installs of Ubuntu and just went with what I had. I preach that all the time so you'd think I'd practice it, eh?
So, who am I and what's my place in the Computer/Internet ecosystem?
Well, I wrote my first code on a TRS-80 Model One with Level 1 Basic, a Z80 CPU clocked at 1.77MHz, 4K (yes, K) of RAM and a cassette drive for mass storage. That was in 1979 at Robertson High School in Las Vegas New Mexico. I'll never forget Mr. Escudero. He taught math, some science, some art history... and a special program that gave a poor kid like me access to some advanced programs. As we outgrew basic Mr. Escudero arranged for the kids in his computer science class to use the local college mainframe. We learned fortran on punch cards. We learned fast to number the cards in pencil in case we dropped them. Rapid Application Development? Ha!
It's 30 years later (can that be possible?) and a lot has changed. I have two kids of my own, I live in San Francisco and I've not been to New Mexico since my Grandmother passed away about 6 years ago. I'm typing this on a Dell Notebook PC with a dual core CPU clocked at 2.5 GHz, 4 Gigabytes of RAM and a 500 Gigabyte hard drive. Let's just say I don't do punch cards.
By day I manage two teams of outstanding Engineers at the leading company in the Digital Signage industry. I won't share much here about that industry, that job, or those people... this is about all the other parts of my life. I still do some minor consulting for old customers (and the occasional new one) as well as playing with various technologies old and new. My kids keep me busy too - and I'll write a lot about them I expect. My dog Ollie (in the banner) provides amusement that may sometimes make the blog. And baseball! Cut me and I bleed orange for my San Francisco Giants.
I plan on writing about a lot of technologies - voice over IP (VoIP), video over IP (IPTV), networking, and of course Linux. I'm especially interested in the resurgence of C programming. I taught myself C while underway on a nuclear submarine in 1989 using Borland Turbo C on a Intel 80286-based notebook PC. I never realized that within a few years I'd be programming major projects in C - on linux no less. My first linux was installed in 1994 and was a pre-1.0 kernel I got from somewhere. Fairly soon I was using linux in production - and even wrote an article for the Linux Journal about it.
Here we are 20 years after I learned C. Java is predominate in my day job - as is PHP, C++, and python - but C is still in use. It's certainly strong in the linux kernel space, the embedded space and for high performance code. I actually think that as we move towards slower, more power efficient systems that C makes a lot more sense for a lot more projects. Java is more mass-production... C is for finely crafted systems. You have to work more, it takes some skill to do well, but the results are like fine art. I'll probably get some flames for my strong C bias, but hey, what's the fun of no controversy, right? I'm sure my posts will generate some. I look forward to it - and to exploring what comes up in this blogging effort so long delayed. It should be fun!
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