{"id":45,"date":"2012-10-15T12:24:52","date_gmt":"2012-10-15T17:24:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/netmammal.com\/?page_id=45"},"modified":"2017-01-12T17:25:23","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T22:25:23","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/netmammal.com\/?page_id=45","title":{"rendered":"About"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been crazy about computers\u00a0since I stumbled in to the computer lab freshman year at my rural high school in Vermont. I remember taking home an intro book to programming in the BASIC computer language. I read that thing cover to cover in one night. I\u2019m guessing that I \u2018forgot\u2019 all the homework assignments which were due the next day! (I was a classic underachiever in high school.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike most entering liberal arts college students, I was lucky enough to already know exactly what I wanted to do with my life before I got to college. My school had a cooperative education program like Northeastern\u2019s, and my first assignment was with Raytheon in Wayland MA. This lead to my working at Raytheon full-time after I graduated, and moving to the Boston area permanently.<\/p>\n

During my corporate career, I\u2019ve had the good fortune to work in lots of different areas. Each time I worked in a new area, I got to learn about something completely different!<\/p>\n

Here is a sampling of the kinds of things I did:<\/p>\n

I wrote programs for those big circular displays like you see in air traffic control rooms. These programs allowed technicians to run tests on a radar system Raytheon was building for the Air Force to spy on Russian missile tests.<\/p>\n

At Digital the computer company, I worked in a group writing programs to help assembly-line folks in DEC\u2019s factories keep track of circuit boards and parts during the manufacturing process.<\/p>\n

Later, I worked on programs to let an IT guy remotely change the settings on a kind of network equipment called a terminal server (sorta like your wireless router on steroids). One of the things I liked about that job was that DEC was downsizing like crazy then, and I got to be the project leader and chief bottle washer. If I was having a low-IQ day, I could just go into our computer lab, and re-organize two huge racks of equipment (one of every model of terminal server DEC had ever made.) I used that hardware to test my programs.<\/p>\n

That lead to another networking job where I was responsible for fixing bugs and maintaining Digital\u2019s DECdns software. DNS naming services help one computer find another computer\u2019s address on a network, just like calling information helps you look up someone\u2019s phone number.<\/p>\n

This is the kind of software which nobody knows or cares anything about until it stops working. Problem is, when one of these \u2018411\u2019 name servers crashes, EVERYTHING grinds to a halt, email, databases, the web \u2014 everything. DEC had one customer who allowed one SCHEDULED downtime of one minute once a month. The reliability of DEC\u2019s software was phenomenal compared to PCs of the time, where Windows 95 was regarded as a huge improvement because it only crashed 2-3 times a week.<\/p>\n

Anyway, Digital had downsized from a team of like 5-10 people, who all had been working on the code for years, to just me and one junior programmer. He and I were in *way* over our heads, but we somehow managed, but that job was high pressure. I can remember getting calls from a national phone company customer at 4AM in the morning with 50 people on a conference call, including the VP.<\/p>\n

I then worked for stints at two different computer networking startups during the Internet boom in the late 1990\u2019s. Problem was, when the Internet bubble collapsed, I found I had to re-invent myself, and out of this came a new career in computers: tech support for local small business and home users. This job found me, as I already had forty customers before I even printed business cards or picked a name for my business.<\/p>\n

\u2026And about that business name. I hope it conveys several important things about my business. Its local, it’s not a franchise, or part of a big corporation that might try to sell you hardware. It\u2019s just me. I also hope you get my sense of humor. Its all a bit much calling yourself a hero (and writing about yourself so much for that matter).<\/p>\n

So after a career where projects sometimes took years, I have found the pleasure of day-to-day problem solving to be a joy. Every day brings new puzzles to solve, whether it\u2019s an annoying wireless network, Macs or Windows, or installing a new printer or computer. The immediate feedback from reducing the pain out of folks tech lives is wonderful, and involves learning something new almost every day.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been crazy about computers\u00a0since I stumbled in to the computer lab freshman year at my rural high school in Vermont. I remember taking home an intro book to programming in the BASIC computer language. I read that thing cover to cover in one night. I\u2019m guessing that I \u2018forgot\u2019 all the homework assignments which … Continue reading About<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-45","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/netmammal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/netmammal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/netmammal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/netmammal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/netmammal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/netmammal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/45\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":158,"href":"https:\/\/netmammal.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/45\/revisions\/158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/netmammal.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}