Professional Notes

I have over 25 years of experience in the IT industry, and have acquired a rather broad background over the course of my career. I started out working as an electronics technician in Los Angeles for Hughes Aircraft Company's Space & Communication group in 1979 (which was later purchased by Boeing after I left), where I first discovered programming.

While there, I wrote software to control and collect data for automated satellite test equipment using 6502 and 8085 assembly languages, as well as Basic, MACBasic, dBASE and a few other high-level languages. I transferred to the Information Systems group and provided both personal computer support and in-house training for programs running on PC and Macintosh platforms, in addition to developing in-house applications using dBASE III and Clipper.

After moving to Georgia in 1988, I worked at a company called Southwire for nine years. While there, I worked as a PC specialist and an Artificial Intelligence developer, using programs such as Level5 and K-Vision (which used ODBC connections to Access and SQL databases). Southwire was where I began developing web sites with HTML. During that time, I also taught PC courses in the evenings at Carroll Technical Institute.

After landing a series of freelance writing assignments, I stopped teaching in the evening to pursue a sideline career as a game designer and editor (see sidebar). Later, I worked as a consultant for a number of Atlanta companies, providing technical support and training for companies such as Digital Equipment Corp./Compaq.

In 1998, I went to work at Medaphis (which became Per-Se Technologies) as a Senior Web Developer, where I created ColdFusion and Javascript applications on the company's intranet; many of these applications utilized Access, FoxPro and SQL Server databases for reporting purposes. While there, I worked quite a bit with ColdFusion, Javascript and SQL server.

In November of 2001, a partner and I started our own Web Hosting and Design company, named NeoScribe Solutions. NeoScribe's focus was to provide affordable web sites for small businesses and neighborhood groups. While NeoScribe was a great learning experience, self-employment pays very little. And so, in 2005, I started a temp-to perm assignment at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center under a contract held by SAIC.

Freelance Writing

During the late 1980's, I relocated to rural West Georgia with my ex-wife. At one point, I had grown so desperate for work, I literally had job applications everywhere, covering several disciplines. One of those fields I was pursuing was the game design field, having been an avid gamer during my post-secondary years in Southern California.

During my tenure at Southwire, I not only worked evenings teaching at the local community college, I also had a work-for-hire contract to design a roleplaying game system with Gary Gygax, called the father of roleplaying games by some. The system was Dangerous Journeys, and I was fortuante enough to co-author the Mythus Fantasy system.

Although the pay for work-for-hire was less than stellar, the opportunity to work with a man like Gary was too much to pass up, and eventually, I dropped the teaching job and focused all my free time on writing. It was grueling, and in the end the game system was buried by personally- motivated litigation. But I will never regret the experience for Gary was truly a wonderful guy to work with.

After working for several years at freelance game design, I eventually gave it up - though I would probably go back to writing given sufficient opportunity and motivation. The question is, after working with Gary, how could I top that?