As of August 2013, after the passing of my wife, I gave myself the gift of early retirement. I sold everything I owned and moved to the beach resort town of Hua Hin, Thailand. I’ve got a small condo in the
center of town and keep myself busy with my electric scooter upgrade projects, 3D design and printing, golf, squash, badminton, pub quizzes and long romantic walks on the beach by myself…
I spent 5 years at REC Solar, the 2nd largest solar power company in the US.
Since I left, REC has now been split in two – the commercial and utility half went to Duke Energy and the residential half went to SunRun. I was the Monitoring Engineer, designing, installing and configuring the data capture technology deployed from our smallest to our largest sites. Most states and electric utilities paid rebate money based on the recorded meter data, so proper design and maintenance is critical. Site status is shown on big screens in our Service office and when something goes wrong we can decide how to best perform the solution.
Before that, I spent 22 years wtih IBM, having about 5 separate careers. My last role was as a “Senior e-Architect” for the IBM Software
Group Developer Relations team. I support IBM’s Independent Software Vendor and Regional Systems Integrator partners who want to include IBM software products and technologies into their solutions.
I provide anything from overall software architecture assistance to point-product briefings and questions. While I handle questions across the IBM software product line (Rational, WebSphere, DB2, Lotus and Tivoli), I am the lead for the Rational software brand and Education & Learning industries, so I get first crack at the requests that come in for those areas. My family and I lived in Melbourne Australia for a year and a half on a project for ANZ Bank, Hannover Germany for a year and a half on a project for GRZ and then a year in Edinburgh Scotland on a project for Bank Of Scotland.
I was also the assigned software architect for the IBM Innovation Center in San Mateo, California. I drive up as needed for customer work or to teach classes and workshops.
I received Bachelor of Science(Honours) and Master of Science in Computer Science degrees from the University of Western Ontario in beautiful London, Ontario, Canada. I did my Master’s Thesis on Steve Job’s NeXT computer and its impact on workstation hardware and software. The NeXT operating system and
sofware developer tools morphed into today’s MacOS.
I held the following certifications:
I have attended and presented at the Colorado Software Summit developer conference (and its predecessor ColoradOS/2). I highly reccommend it for anyone interested in Java and Internet development. From the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep, you’ll be learning from the experts.
In my past computer life, I have:
Customers I’ve worked for:
ANZ Bank (Melbourne, Australia), J.B. Hunt Logistics (Lowell, Arkansas), Depository Trust (New York, New York), First Direct Bank (Leeds, England), Nationsbank (Charlotte, North Carolina and Jacksonville, Florida), BankOne (Columbus, Ohio), ScotiaBank (Toronto, Canada), Carreker-Antinori (Atlanta, Georgia), US Bank (Minneapolis, Minnesota), European Patent Office (The Hague, Netherlands), UBS Bank (Zurich, Switzerland), SBC Communications ( Dallas, Texas), Ameritech (Chicago, Illinois) and AIA Insurance (Hong Kong), GRZ (Ahlten, Germany), HSBC (Sheffield, England) and Bank of Scotland (Edinburgh, Scotland).