What I do now
These days I do what I must and want to do. I’ve done a fair bit of technical and even administrative project management for large and small teams and teams scattered across geographies. Time shifts on. I’ve left Visa after a year with some of the best teams and vendors I’ve had the pleasure to work with and for. I’ve shifted emphasis at Celestix Networks and am building the product management and evangelism around our core Linux offerings. I also own and deliver company-wide knowledge management solutions.
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. 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!
What I did before
Before was before. But before I did archeology and it was fun. 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 have a really significant family unit consisting of my wife, two kids, and a spirited golden retriever. My wife and I have been together for a few “dog years” and we have this relationship which transcends the kids since we were together a significant period of time before they came along. Its like a hidden thing we roll out and discuss every so often. Our kids are 17 and 10, so you can see we rested and played, rested and played :). We were on a 7 year schedule. The dog is the dog and Misty is the best for us. She loves the kids and has become a neighborhood dog for all the kids that love animals.
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