Re: [9fans] drawterm sweepstakes

[Jim Choate <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>]

On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Dan Cross wrote:

> So what do you do?

Now? What it take to make $$$$, but seriously;

Well I quit IBM about a month ago and besides doing 24/365 onsite computer
repair we're doing full-time P9 development. And no I'm not going to spend
a great deal of time talking about that at this point ;)

open-forge.org

While I worked for IBM? I was a Tivoli employee doing enterprise scale
management (eg stock exchanges in NY and Chicago), in particular I was
responsible for the 24/365 trouble team across our CORBA based products.
This involved customers like Intel, DoD, Human Genome Project, etc. That
was from 97 to 2000. I quit in 2000 to do P9 stuff but they hounded me
into coming back to take care of the CORBA certification issues. I was
responsible for managing the production upgrades for all our customers
across all the various platforms and CORBA products. I basically sandboxed
upgrades of production systems and resolved problems before the customer
did. Over the the three years I also helped resolve technical questions
that had sales stalled, I had the only group that could respond fast
enough and had the tools and experience. We averaged between $85-100M in
saved sales in those three years. That job closed down last Dec. and was
moved to China. I was hoping that I wouldn't get reassigned but was given
a job at the Linux Technology Center helping develop Linux distros for
internal product apps. Can't tell you (or even other IBM employees for
that matter) more. The main problem once IBM bought Tivoli was they
prevented me from doing any programming for anyone but them (to answer the
many questions on that point that people have asked). It was so boring and
the people so unintersting I just quit.

Before that? I worked for Austin Community College developing a
Semiconductor Technology program that was meant to train technicians to
work in fabs. It was only the fourth such program to ever be certified.
I was responsible for the course development and lab design.

Before that I worked for CompuAdd doing technical support for things like
Desert Storm. I also worked in the Point of Sale group doing  real time
support of the bejillion stores that McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Sears, etc. had
using our equipment.

Before that I worked for UT Austin in their security section. Myself and
one other engineer built the larget private computer controlled security
system on the planet, at that time (about '88).

While doing that I also worked with Dr. Jack Turner [1], Dr. Karl Trappe,
and several other individuals doing a hands-on science museum. I was
responsible for the exhibit construction and management. Among other
things I helped kick start the Robot Group and the Childrens Museum here
in Austin.

[1] http://order.ph.utexas.edu

Before that I did geophysics work (magneto-tellurics) and before that I
worked on c-beam atomic clocks.

Before that (very early 80's) I worked as a student at UT Austin on a DoD
project that was part of the same NSF project that led to Sun. My group
was approaching the 'router problem' using a non-Von Neumann architecture
cpu. It was a mono-bus design using CAM w/ built in processing (ala
74181's) build entirely from 7400 chips. My job was to build the cpu's and
bus controllers (it has a multi-split bus so that you could create these
really nifty parallel isolated computers at will). It was based around the
RTL (register transfer language and not resistor transistor logic) theory.
It ran at 40MHz when everybody else was hollering about 4.77. It kicked
butt. We saturated the network at UT so the only way we could test its
full throughput was to program it to be a 64 voice synthesizer. It's
fortunate the synth player for Journey was teaching a class at the time
and one of the other students was taking the course.

Before that I worked fixing 2-way radios, repairing tv's and home
appliances, and my first job as a cook at McDonalds.

Hope that answers your (and others) questions.

 -- --

God exists because mathematics is consistent, and the Devil exist because we
can't prove it.
                          Andre Weil, in H. Eves, Mathematical Circles Adieu

      ravage@ssz.com                            jchoate@open-forge.com
      www.ssz.com                               www.open-forge.com