my relationship with technology

This is the first New Year of the Signal Time blog. I am going to do this one time so it's documented.

my relationship with technology. not necessarily the 21st century kind.

I've owned this domain since 1998 and have been on the Internet since 1994. A couple of years before that you would have found me on a local bbs. I focused on the computer as a business tool in high school, learning about word processing and spreadsheets. My first computer was a VIC-20 that I bought at a garage sale in 1984. I wrote a lot of bad programs, but I did learn to type. So, that's a lot of years kicking around computers and the web.

Two short enlistments in the Army taught me to take a structured approach to trial and error, and rename it research and development. I graduated first in my class, because I could type.

I spent a year in Uijeongbu, Korea as part of A Company 304 Signal Bn. There we learned about RATT Rigs. I was a single channel radio operator. A RATT Rig is a mobile radio teletype shelter strapped to a CUCV. We moved them to hummers and I immediately broke my front axle trying to prevent my 2 mogas generators, on a trailer I was towing, from dragging me down the side of a mountain during monsoon season. Basically, we sent each other text messages over HF radios. I learned about RF interference, internal combustion engines and turtle ditches. I also began to realize how big the world was.

Then came Orlando. My unit was HSC, Military Intelligence Battalion, (Low Intensity). AKA MI BN (LI). I worked for the CESO (Signal Officer). We developed a ground unit support platform (ARST) while supporting operations in Haiti, assisting FEMA in the Caribbean and deploying the Predator UAV in Bosnia. I also successfully deployed the ARST system from an aircraft carrier in support of the Predator program. We were the first unit to ever deploy an unmanned in combat. By that time I think it was technically Joint Services.

I was also the phone guy. Key systems here I come. I was more like a cable dog. I ran more wire and installed more jacks than anything else. To this day I still punch down all new extensions in our office and handle all reconfigurations of our Toshiba phone system. It's too easy not to. One more thing, if it plugs into the wall and it isn't working, call the CESO.

As much as I loved the satellite radios, encryption devices, microwave transceivers and imaging software, I preferred learning about our Lantastic network. Computing was the future and I wanted in. BTW, those are big words for simple things. The microwave transceiver I used was essentially a Sony Watchman in a rugged case. It had a small, but very effective, line of sight antennae that captured unsecured streaming video from the Predator. Obviously, there was a bit more in the case, but on the surface, that's what it was. You could record to tape and stream raw video, which was processed on site and transmitted wherever. In big chunks or small chunks, depending on how it was being sent.

When I left the Army I found a job as a computer builder. That's how it was advertised. They didn't want us to do anything but assemble. Unfortunately for them, they hired 2 guys that were hungry to learn about computers from the ground up. Within a month we were running the shop. A few months later the owner opened a wholesale warehouse in Tampa, we both followed. That's an honorable mention for rusisi.

I spent a couple of years working in wholesale and another couple at the retail level. On the side I set up Windows Servers, Exchange, SQL and IIS web sites. It is amazing the variety of programs people use. When you set up a network for someone, it always requires configuring a program that you have never used before. That prompts the adult version of homework. After assembling and testing almost 10,000 computers by hand, I learned all parts are not the same. They are not all meant to work together. But if you're like me, you go for the newest, with the least amount of information and support. Then you break it.

Here's a few side notes. My father started working from home when I was in 8th grade. He has been legally blind most of his life and all of mine. Unfortunately, he is using an old version of IBM Home Page Reader on a Windows XP machine. One thing we both agree on, IBM got the navigation right, they just stopped updating the application. It has problems with JavaScript and Flash is hit or miss. Other companies understand the web page reading part, they just don't get navigation. Also, why should visually impaired people have to sit behind a desktop computer to interact? They shouldn't, and I am very encouraged by the progress of accessibility applications on Android. Because it can be done using apps, I see changes on the horizon.

More side notes. The reason my father worked from home was because he was self employed. He and a few partners owned a home health care company. Along with my 2 years of business computing in high school, I also took 2 years of accounting. I wrote checks and associated the transactions to the appropriate accounts at my father's direction from day one. Math is fun but business management is more fun. Outlining a businesses image and developing a road map to get there. Understanding as many aspects of the organization as possible. Driving the initiatives. It's great to get ideas from panels and groups BUT, my belief is, a corporation is not a democracy. No consensus is needed. People believe in you because you have a vision and a plan, not just because you're in charge.

Last side note. I have supervised or led others most of my working life. Why is that important? It's not enough to know something, in order to complete the cycle, you have to share. I have tried to pick every brain I've ever had access to.

This year marks 11 years with my current employer. The owner posted an ad for a billing person with Windows network experience. It seemed like a pretty strange ad, but coincidentally, those were skills I possessed. Before I implement anything at my office, I like to thoroughly destroy it at home. My first test machine was running Windows 95 on an overclocked Pentium 75. AKA Super Computer I. SC09 is currently running Ubuntu 10.04 on a dual core AMD 2.4. It's done W2K8 server with 3 virtualized boxes, running everything from CentOS to Win7 Beta. Between the Vista and Win7 Beta programs, I went almost 3 years without buying software.

At work we host 6 web sites locally. Our primary programming languages are classic ASP, PHP, JavaScript and AJAX. There is also a VOIP Asterisk IVR running on CentOS, an SQL database server and a Planet Press machine for document creation. Last but not least, there's our Idatix document storage server, which also does barcode extraction for processing contracts. I work for an in-store promotions company. We pay thousands of people bi-weekly, all of those contracts run through the extraction process. They are paid on pay cards that we load with our own custom api's using SOAP. Some still get the pressure sealed checks we process in-house. I tested all of these things at home first, with the exception of Planet Press. Our next major project is to move all of this junk into the cloud. Oh yeah, I also rely heavily on Google and Facebook api's for geocoding, mapping, routing and content sharing.

I'm more of a technology junkie than a computer geek. I've turned my xbox into a media server, bought cheap Android tablets from China and bricked more than my share of embedded devices. I have netbooks, notebooks and pda's just lying around the house. There are enough parts in my living room to build 2 or 3 computers. You never know when you'll need a small network at home to test something. I have car stereos and amplifiers, televisions and old smart phones in various stages of disassembly. I've still got an Emerson digital alarm clock my brother gave me in 1984. Dual alarm, battery backup, and it still works. There are parts to 6 Walkmans and 2 portable CD players in my closet. A D-Link MP3 player with 32MB of RAM and my favorite, the 5 boxes of cables, many of which I pinned out, then changed to meet my needs.

Today I began my first ever testing with Chroma Key (using a green screen). My current netbook, a Samsung N150 Plus, is adequate, but far from ideal. SC09 may need to become a video editing machine next. A new adventure awaits, but it's really just another chance to break stuff. One more chance for trial and error. Exposure to yet another cool thing. It's what drives me, what makes me tick. I feel very lucky my passions and the future have aligned so closely throughout the years. I am a dreamer, and proud of it. But, I am also a doer, not because I'm afraid of failure or afraid of not trying, because I don't know any different. It has never really been about technology. It's been about the future, and not limiting my expectations of it. It's been about imagining what could be, then chasing after it.

That's my relationship with technology.

unous
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