This site is a place for me to collect miscellaneous items and is also a jumping off point to other sites that I have.

My background:

I was a Construction Mechanic in the Seabees for 4 years. I was fortunate while in the Navy to be able to live in Puerto Rico for 2 years. I was on a small base near Ponce, which had a closed runway. We were able to start a flying club and keep a plane there. It was great place to learn to fly.

I then transferred to the Air Force as a General Purpose mechanic for two years. During those two years I worked on switching my job to be able to learn computer programming. In Dec 1979 I was fortunate to be accepted for training and I went to Biloxi, MS for 3 months. It was an 11 week course completely dedicated to learning problem solving, assembler, and Fortran. I was fortunate to have two excellent instructors. One of the instructors was retiring after our class. He worked on SAGE computers in the 50’s. I loved to listen to his stories about working on early computers. He had an incredible talent for explaining difficult concepts and a straight forward logical approach for solving problems. I believe that my abilities at debugging and solving tough problems can be traced back to his teaching.

I was fortunate to get assigned to Offutt Air Force Base in 1980. I worked with a small team on creating 3D B-52 and Cruise Missile Mission planning software. I worked there for 5 years. The workstations we used had 4k x 4k resolution and real time 3D. They even had a 3D track ball. They were vector graphic displays and we spent a lot of time optimizing code to generate the smallest display list possible. Vector displays will flicker if you take too long to draw a single frame. It was a fun challenging assignment.

Since being discharged from the Air Force I have been working at a nuclear power plant located on the seacoast of NH. I have been there almost 33 years now. 

I have programmed in many different languages starting off with Fortran. The mission planning software was mainly written in PL/I with calls out to modules written in Fortran and Cobol.

I learned Assembler, C, and Basic when working on PC’s in the early 80’s.

What I do now:

My main focus at work is writing utilities or interface software used to tie various vendor packages together.

Because of this focus I am always looking at ways to get things done quickly, easily, and with minimal footprint/dependencies on the desktop or server.

Quality, accuracy, dependability, and minimal maintenance is what I strive for in software.