wanna go HOME now...
SATAN DRIVES TO WORK

 
  Today : C. SemiV. 



25.12.1996

Me
Planet Earth

Skills
------
Relational databases: 	theory, SQL, QUEL (hah).  mostly worked with
			INGRES specifically, have worked with Sybase
			for the last year-ish
Programming languages: 	C (good enough), C++ (sort of)
			minimal knowledge of COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, 
			and ADA , from having to provide support
			to programmers working in those languages

			and does Perl count? love me that Perl 5
Operating systems: 	Unix, VMS, MacOS, NT, DOS, Win95
Other stuff:		Technical support, policy/planning experience.
			Bad poetry.


Work History
------------

1900-1959	Incubation.
1959		Born.
1959-1981	Did some stuff.  Nothing particularly relevant.

1981-1992	RTI==>Ingres==>ASK/Ingres==>CA/Ingres

		I started work for Relational Technology, Inc. in 1981
		as the company gofer.  RTI was formed by three UC Berkeley
		professors to commercialize the INGRES dbms and related
		development tools.  Within about a year I acquired
		the job of managing our customer database, and developing
		interfaces to it for data entry & management (at first
		using simple query tools, then our own development 
		tools, eventually including C programming).

		By 1983ish I was essentially the MIS department for the
		company.  This was possible because our financials were
		handled externally and the engineering department could
		largely take care of its own needs.  I did work for
		customer service, administrative and management groups.

		Around 1985 (I think), they finally hired an MIS manager
		and created a formal department, in order to develop
		a financial system for our own use, based on our own
		software.  I continued working in that group for about
		a year, and then moved to Technical Support.

		I worked in Tech Support until I left Ingres in 1992.
		For the last 3 to 4 years of that time, I was a senior
		technical specialist, which was a fancy way of being
		able to promote people without forcing them to be 
		managers.  It was an equivalent "rank" to senior 
		manager in the department.  I was involved in budgets,
		policy setting, planning and the like.  

		Technically, my main focus was on user front-ends and
		development tools, including our programming language
		tools.  I also learned the rest of the product to a
		fair degree, including internals of the database engine
		and optimizer, as my group had to provide training on
		these subjects for other people in the company.

1992		Rest.

1993-1997(?)	Wired.  

		I started out at Wired answering email that was piling
		up in the subscriptions department.  I got tired of answering
		the same questions all the time, so I wrote the infamous
		autosub mail filter & reply thing.  The fellow who was
		running the subscription database in MacSub left, so I
		took that job over.  That involved doing the twice-monthly
		label runs, running reports, helping prepare for ABC
		circulation audits, pulling customer lists to rent out
		to third parties, and the like. I also helped people with 
		various tech things, particularly Filemaker.  This was all 
		done as a "contractor".

		Eventually the database got too large to handle in house,
		so I helped convert it for use by NeoData and put myself
		out of a job for a while.  After about 5 months, they
		brought foreign subscriptions back in house, so I got that 
		set up (we were once again using MacSub).  We also began
		a project to start gathering email addresses of subscribers,
		since NeoData could not store them in its database.

		In September of 1995 (!), I was hired as a full-time
		employee, with the ostensible goal of working on the
		now-legendary "megabase" - putting all of the information
		used in running the magazine (authors/artists, contracts,
		etc.) into a database system.  One thing after another
		seemed to crop up, though, and then the project was put
		on hold until just recently.  In the meantime, I've done
		more Filemaker work, wrote the scripts for handling on-line
		subscriptions & WiredWare purchases from the web site,
		set up a Classified Ads system, and continued to help
		the circulation group in their ongoing struggle with NeoData.

		And so on.

2000:		This is very out of date. Wired does not really exist
		anymore. I jumped ship to Wired Digital (which used to
		be called Hotwired), just before Wired Magazine was bought
		by Conde Nast. Then Wired Digital was bought by Lycos.
		Then Lycos was bought by Terra. (Mars put in a bid but
		wouldn't meet our relocation costs.) 

		Unfortunately I have a terrible memory for dates, so
		I don't really know when any of that happened. Just the
		sequence.

		I came to this-nameless-entity-which-is-part-of-the-Borg
		to work on the website for Wired Magazine, which we still
		publish, even though we are not part of the same company
		as the Magazine anymore, because god forbid that we do
		things that make sense.  So I still take care of that.
		Starting about a year - no, two years I guess, but don't
		hold me to that - I've been working on the Vignette 
		Anti-Publishing System for Wired News. 

		Whee.




Willfully blind self-indulgent nebbish or amusingly quirky old coot? And how bout that local sports team? Discuss among yourselves.

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