What I do now
I’m happily working now at Celestix Networks and am building core engineering process across all the platforms we work on. Its challenging and fun work. I also am the acting Celestix India operations manager so I spend time over in Chennai, India.
Prior to this, I worked as a Project Manager for Visa USA. I liked working for a company that understood the basic needs around doing services and support the right way. Work at a major financial institution was different. Very classical 9 to 5 thing most of the days I reported there.
I think startups have a distinct requirement and need and after doing multiples and even going back to others, I reached my zenith. Now I’m glad to be what I am and have what I have. My time at Levanta ended in December of 2006. It was an interesting year but I’m glad we don’t do repeats. At Levanta, we never were bred for success and it showed. Its difficult to create something of value when the very company that wants it finds no value in it. I still wish them luck; I’m just glad I ain’t there. Someone asked me my primary memory from Levanta just recently. I remember a great team I managed and a struggling company that just could not seem to focus correctly. Here is an update on Levanta. Its gone. Puff! and up in smoke it went.
Way back in the past, I was a project manager at the Free Standards Group and did the usual tasks and even more there. I was involved at many levels with management goals, delivering support for the wide ranging Linux Standards Base, and I also did infrastructure management there. I’ve worked at a few places like Linuxcare, the GAP, and others. At Linuxcare I started this business unit called Linuxcare Labs, did presales engineering, technical account management, and lots of project management. I traveled out to Round Rock, Texas a lot to meet up with this certain little OEM in Texas. It was all fun but the travel was at like 70% and I got to know the hotel rooms better than my own home. I also did work with IBM, Sun Microsystems, HP, and a group of others. Linuxcare was focused on Linux in the enterprise.
At one point in time or another, I also worked at Technorati way back when. That was kinda interesting. I directed operations for awhile there and managed data center and hardware vendors and built some interesting stuff. I also put some years in at at the GAP, I counted myself lucky because I met this group of folks that knew how to build out teams and my boss then became my friend for years now. I started doing OS/2 desktop support, large hardware migrations and deployments, software installation, and major procurement actions. The GAP has 3 campuses here and there and I was fortunate enough to be on all of them one time or another. In the end, I was a technical services manager charged with deployments and management of up to 10 engineers engaged in deploying hardware, software, doing migrations, etc. It was fun! Many of the folks I worked with at the GAP ended up at Linuxcare.
What I did before
Before was before. But before I did archeology and it was fun. Note that there is no second “a” in archeology, okay? I worked across the southwestern United States and most significantly for me the western rim of the Mojave Desert known as the Antelope Valley. At one point or another I was involved with natural gas pipeline projects, electrical transmission line projects, and even classified testing programs as a Project Archeologist at Edwards AFB. Archeology is an exciting but rather isolated endeavor. Scientists spend most of each year lost in the wilds, doing research, building sets of data; but they come together at annual scientific meetings. Listening to papers, discussing finds, arguing over temporal and spatial characteristics. In my field of endeavor, I studied prehistoric patterns of behavior, technology around flaked stone tool construction and morphology, and also worked quite a bit on prehistoric cooking pits as indicators of social complexity. I left all that some years ago for a variety of reasons; but a lot of it was around work and stability and travel. But all that is another story…
Family Matters
I am lucky and blessed to have a full complement of family members. My wife and I have been together for a whole bunch of dog years and we have a son and daughter. We also have a 110 pound or so Golden Retriever and a spunked out cat which terrorizes the dog. Golden’s are great pets but are not really too brave when facing a 10 pound cat.
