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 General Manager of the Celestix India Office 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.
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 southwest, the southern great plains, 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…
