The quick early days summary:

• Pennsylvania native that grew up in Alabama (what a contrast of environments, if I ever need therapy, it will definitely come up)
• Eagle Scout and Order of the Arrow.
• Playtime was building electronic gadgets in my bedroom - Which meant I effectively destroyed the carpet and walls of my room with drops of molten solder, wire fragments, and projects that didn't work so good and got really hot before striking the floor burning what ever it contacted.

Escape from Alabama (original concept for the movie that became renamed to Escape from New York because movie executives figured most of the country would think Escape from Alabama was a foreign film) happened several days after high school graduation the spring or 1982. Went to the beach - Daytona Beach, Florida, for 13 years.

Original plan was to do four years at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU), pickup the necessary req's to go to a Rockwell, Gruman, or Boeing Aerospace Division to build rockets. I did my part - BS Computer Science with Microprocessor Technology - but my timing was really bad. Graduated the Spring of 1986 - four months after a defective 'O' ring design on the shuttle's SRB allowed hot gases to escape leading to a 'major malfunction'. It's really tough for a rookie to compete with the flood of recently cut 5, 10, and 15+ year engineers and scientists in the aerospace market.

While at ERAU, I worked as a service technician for a Apple Computer dealership - Mini-Concepts, Inc.. By the time I graduated, I was the Service Manager for the three location dealership. Not having many - okay, no - offers from anyone to build rockets, I stuck around Mini-Concepts as the General Manager, running the service departments,company-wide inventory management and ordering, and daily corporate stuff.

During the eleven years I was at Mini-Concepts, Inc., many things happened, but the connection to how I went from Mini-Concepts to San Antonio is - I think - interesting. Scroll below to read the Florida-Kansas connection.

Summer of 1994 I became Director of Client Development of the San Antonio office of Direct Digital Design. Basically, I made sure equipment worked, examined and streamlined the work flow of our and our client's production, and tried to eliminate steps with either work flow changes or automation product. I left Florida for San Antonio, Texas.

After a year, DDD rightly decided it didn't need to split production between San Antonio and Kansas City, and moved everything from San Antonio to Kansas City, only I didn't get in the moving truck.

As I had been writing software (actually using my degree!) to solve much of the database and automation issues, I worked an arrangement where I'd continue writing software at home and fly to Kansas City every other week. Occasionally going to a client's site. Figured it be a three month to one year thing - that was 1995, and I'm still doing it.

Today I am the Director of Geekdom at DDD. Much of today's work is Internet related, or highly specialized QuarkXpress Xtensions or AppleScript's to automate things. Things that I'm certified for or registered as are:

• Apple Computer Select Developer (Active)
• Registered QuarkXpress Xtension Developer (Active)
• FileMaker Pro Developer (Inactive)
• Alaras Plugin Developer (Inactive)
• Apple Computer Service, LaserWriter, AppleShare, and bunches other (Inactive)

The systems and programming I do include:

• C and C++ with/Macintosh Toolbox (Active)
• AppleScript (Active)
• FaceSpan (Active)
• FileMaker Pro database design and ScriptMaker (Active)
• Accius 4th Dimension (Inactive)
• Unix/Linux (Active)
• Macintosh 8/9 and Mac OS X (Active)
• MySQL database design (Active)
• PHP (Active)

The Florida - Kansas City Connection

At Mini-Concepts I became the 'accounting' and 'graphic' guy. At the time I really knew little about accounting (that didn't stop me from writing an Apple II Pascal based account package for the fernery business), and even less about graphics and design. I learned the software packages making me the 'expert'. Accounting and business knowledge grew quickly as I was able to see the back room operations of my client's as I helped them setup, train, and support their accounting installations. I sold, installed, and trained client's on applications like Photoshop, Freehand, PageMaker, and QuarkXpress.

I had some pretty cool client's including Nascar (I helped - okay, it was a microscopic, but I was there and you weren't - with preparing the Nascar pitch to McDonalds to sponsor a car), a race promoter ("sorry Steve, that was Cale (Yarbrough) on the phone..."), and the local GE Aerospace Simulator Division ("don't bring any disks or storage media - stuff is classified here and you won't be able to leave with your media"). My graphics exposure exploded when I started working with a local color separator selling Macintosh based workstations that interfaced with high-end graphic production stations from Scitex. This relationship peaked when I was rented to a client of the separator who had fallen behind in building their next catalog. I helped build pages, and made a contact that would later change my and my brother's career direction.

The client I was rented to had wanted me back the following week. As the GM of Mini-Concepts I couldn't be away yet another week. Just so happened my brother Rob was moving from Alabama that week, figuring he'd stay with his big bother who lived 2 miles from the beach. Rob pulled in the driveway on a Thursday night, he was on a plane for Wisconsin that Sunday night with the same QuarkXpress manual I read the previous week on the same flight.

Rob worked there the following week, and stayed for the following, and stayed another week, another, and another... six weeks total returning when the client's catalog was done. The client worked with two color separators, the one I was co-working with in Florida, and another located in Kansas City. The contact that Rob and I made talked about us to the owner of the Kansas City separator. About a year later Rob received an invitation to visit Kansas City and accepted a job with Direct Digital Design (DDD).

Rob didn't like Kansas City, and when the same position opened in San Antonio, he moved to San Antonio and DDD hired an former Mini-Concepts employee for the Kansas position. DDD grew, and more former Mini-Concepts employees moved to both Kansas City and San Antonio: Rob, Eric, Greg, Mike, and Ron.

Apple Computer suffered bad times - mostly self-inflicted wounds, and while Mini-Concepts was able to successfully adapt to the market and Apple's shifting policies, eventually it had to shut it's doors. For me an eleven year run came to an end.

Rob had left DDD about a year or so after working in DDD's San Antonio facility to start his own business PixelWorks. It just so happened the second replacement to Rob had left DDD - I flew to Kansas City and accepted the opening which was in San Antonio.

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