Cure your insomnia and read about Wendell here…
The Early Yawns
I was born in Southern California and our family moved to Hawaii when I was about 5 years old. I have an older sister Loretta who lives in Pennsylvania and works as a computer programmer. My older brother Norman lives in Los Angeles and works for a company that builds satellites. My younger brother Fred lives in Hawaii and works for a toner cartridge company. My mom Tsuruyo — “Sue” — also lives in Hawaii and is retired.
I grew up in Honolulu on the island of Oahu, which is the main island that is also home to Waikiki, Diamond Head, Hawaii 5-0, Magnum PI, Don Ho and a host of other fine tourist attractions. 🙂
In general Hawaii’s weather is quite nice, although the summers can be outrageously humid. A good amount of early morning rains help to keep the foliage green and the mosquitos hale and hearty.
I attended the University of Hawaii initially as a Mechanical Engineering major although after 3 years I decided that structural moments and thermodynamic phase transitions were melting my brain so I switched over to Computer Science which at the time had slightly less brain-melting properties.
Back in those ancient times of computers you could still program the mainframe beasts using these 7″x3″ punch cards. Each card had one line of computer code so a program would consist of stacks and stacks of punch cards. Programming seemed very tactile back then unlike our sterile environments today, sitting at a nice clean wireless keyboard with a high-res flat screen monitor…ah, any of you programmers over the age of 40 know what I’m talking about…
At the university they didn’t allow students to take more than 2 programming classes at a time — too hard to complete all the programming assignments, they said — so I ended up taking more math classes to fill my class schedule. Eventually I ended up getting a degree in both computer science and mathematics which as you all know is the ultimate chick magnet degree. 😉
Working on Sleepy Eyes
After graduation I started working as a programmer for a local credit card manufacturing company called VeriFone, which had 250 employees when I started and eventually grew to a few thousand employees. VeriFone was later acquired — and subsequently jettisoned — by HP.
I worked in the software R&D department for about 4 years before I decided to transfer to their technical operations group in Costa Mesa, California. It was a sort of engineering/development/skunk works support group and I thought it would be more interesting to see how customers were using our programs and equipment rather than sitting back in our programming ivory towers in Hawaii.
Our department in California had an engineering lab setup and our jobs were to basically duplicate and solve any type of field problems customers were having with our products. It was fun detective work and the people in the department were really sharp. We had devices to duplicate a user’s environment like an oven to simulate a hot and humid location like India and a static discharge gun to recreate a dry environment like Arizona. We would raid the “bone yard” for spare parts and equipment and the hardware guys would sometimes Frankenstein together some weird home-brew circuit or contraption for their test setups.
It was really a lot like the CSI TV show where scientists try to solve criminal cases. We just had less bullets and blood. We did have a unit that caught on fire though at a customer’s location. That was exciting.
During my stint I got to do some travelling abroad and visited places like China, Japan, Singapore, and England.
VeriFone was generous to their employees during their high growth years and they paid for my graduate school when I decided to attend UC Irvine to get my MBA.
My last transfer within the company was to a newly formed Quality Assurance group which was probably my most fun and interesting job. It was more “puzzle-solving” work although this time the goal was to solve business process problems rather than problems with physical equipment.
Looking back it was really a unique experience working for VeriFone and I learned a lot of esoteric technologies which of course have all faded from my memory, except for an occasional acronym or geekish phrase that I sometimes blurt out without provocation. CRC! Luhn check digit! Dataline monitor! It’s all good, though. I think.
More Followup Yawns
After 12 years of working at VeriFone I got working wander-lust and did some job hopping, first moving about 80 miles south to San Diego to work as a project manager at Qualcomm — I spent just a blink of time there — and then to another project manager job at a small internet startup also in San Diego for about a year or two. That company eventually imploded about the same time the tech bubble burst and I decided to move back to my old place in Irvine. I ended up working for another startup as VP of Engineering for about a year.
About that time I was getting a little burned out at working for other companies and after a bit of soul-searching I decided to try my hand at working just for myself. So I hung out my “Computer Networking and Services” shingle and started doing networking and computer consulting for small businesses and eventually started to focus more on residential customers which is a kind of niche market in this area. As it turns out, a lot of my residential customers have more computers than small businesses so the market is definitely growing.
Now You Must Sleep
Working for myself gave me a more flexible work schedule which allowed me more time to do volunteer work at the local animal shelter. I love animals so that was a definite plus. I’ve tapered off a bit on the volunteer work lately although I’m anxious to get back into the thick of things. I still drop by to help out with the major pet events, though, and I put together a free pet website that lists local pet news, clubs, and shelters.
For about 10 years I did foil fencing although I’m totally retired from that activity now. It’s pretty tough on the joints and after that I spent a few years doing Pilates and yoga just to mend myself. Right now Nancy and I do a lot of walking and stretching for exercise and I occasionally work on the exercise ball when I’ve had too much dessert.
ZZZZZZ
For the last 3 or 4 years I’ve been turning my attention towards search engine optimization which deals with techniques for marketing websites on the internet. This is very useful considering Nancy and I are starting a new business that deals directly with website promotion. It’s kind of a weird subject so I’ll save it for another posting. I know I’ve put all of you into a deep slumber by now. 😯