Tell Us About Yourself

  • 20 February 2013
  • 23 replies
  • 23 views

Userlevel 6
  • Community Leader
  • 324 replies
I thought it might be a good idea if we let others in this community know a little bit about ourselves:  our work, our passions, our family, etc.  Here’s the opportunity.  I’ll start the ball rolling.
 
I grew up on Long Island and attended the University of Vermont and the George Washington University Law School.  I graduated law school in 1967.  After that, I spent two years on active duty in the U.S. Army, the first year at the Presidio of San Francisco as an armed forces courier, and the second year in Vietnam as a company commander.  When I finished my military tour, I returned to New York and started a law practice in Manhattan as a commercial litigator.  I spent about thirty-five years in that field.
 
I was actively practicing in the 70s when computers and word processing began.  I remember buying a Syntrex Word Processing System in the 70s for my practice, and it proved invaluable.  We used floppy disks.  I remember how impressed I was, at that time, that a floppy disk could hold 360 kb of data.   It was a great program and I used it until the 90s, when I switched to Microsoft Word because Syntrex was no longer supported.  I’m reasonably computer literate and now spend a lot of time online, surfing the net and writing.
 
I am an avid outdoor sports enthusiast … as a participant, not as a spectator.  I started playing golf when I was about eight years old, was a three handicap when I was fourteen, and played regularly until I finished college.  While in college, I started skiing at Stowe, Vermont, and that became my passion.  I’ve skied throughout Europe, the United States, and Canada.  My real passion is deep powder skiing, which I enjoy both in the Western United States (Snowbird, Alta and Veil) and Canada (Whistler and the Canadian Rockies).  I still enjoy it and would rather be doing that than almost anything.
 
I’m also an avid scuba diver and have done a lot of diving in the South Pacific:  Palau, Australia, the Solomon Islands, Indonesia, Papua, New Guinea, Fiji, etc.  Like skiing, scuba diving is another of my passions.
 
I started playing four wall handball in New York City in the 70s and ultimately competed in the sport during the 90s, travelling all over the U.S. to compete in local, state, regional and national tournaments.  It is a great game that relatively few play, because it is very challenging.  It is the one sport that requires ambidexterity to become really good at it.  I was in my fifties when I started competing and was in the best shape of my life when I was playing in tournaments.  I was 5' 11," 195 pounds, and ripped.  Sadly, I'm a little heavier now!
 
Within the past fifteen years, I became an avid fisherman … primarily deep water fishing for large fish like blue fin, yellow fin, and big eye tuna.  My largest fish, a blue fin tuna weighing about 500 pounds, was caught using standup gear, meaning that I did not fight the fish from a chair or with a rod holder (like you see on "Wild Tuna"), but rather, standing up using a bucket harness.
 
Sports and the outdoors have been my greatest joys!
 
Married, but separated from my wife.  No kids. Two greyhounds (those of us who are fortunate enough to have animals know and appreciate that  they are truly God's creatures!)  When someone asks me:  "Were they rescued?," my response has always been:  "No, they rescued me!"

23 replies

Userlevel 6
Come on, folks.  Let's see some participation on this thread!    I feel kind of foolish being the only one to post!  😞
Userlevel 7
@ wrote:
Come on, folks.  Let's see some participation on this thread!    I feel kind of foolish being the only one to post!  :(
I'm working on it. I've had an interesting life in the last 62 years. 😃
Userlevel 7
I promise I will put something down too.  It might be tomorrow though as I have an unusually long day today ahead.of me.
Userlevel 7
OK, just a brief presentation of mine. Sorry for my brevity but I am not so used to speak about myself ;)

Male, almost 40 (this summer), married for 21 years, one 20-years daughter and two yorkshire terriers (ladies). Living in the Czech Republic in a town hundred kilometers far from the capitol Prague.

After completion of studies in the technical institute, entered into an engineering & contracting company acting in the field of chemical and petrochemical industry. After a few years I achieved up a top managerial position where I am since then.

My main interests are sport in general (an active tenis player and cyclist), motorsport (F1), computers, music, gadgets (mobile, tablet etc.) and so on, in short everything what is usual for a middle aged person. I have to highlight my passion for animals, especially dogs. My father has a breeding station of the german shepherds so I grew up between dogs so naturaly I fell in love with them.

So that's all. I am not so interesting guy to talk more about myself 😃
Userlevel 7
About me... Let's see.
 
Male, 38 years old. Grew up in a very rural area.  I was always interested in mechanics and electronics at a very young age. I would take apart my grandfathers stuff and attempt to put them back together. On occasion, he would help me take apart my own toys even if it involved a hacksaw. My mom remarried and we moved to a farm so was driving big old John Deere tractors plowing fields and feeding cows by the time I was 10.
 
I went to college for Electronics Engineering, but did not graduate due to money issues. The lack of calculus ability did not help, either! So, after a few semesters, I moved back in with my grandfather while he battled colon cancer. I started working on televisions for a satellite TV dealer and woudl help him install the old large 10' dishes. Left that job and worked for a company installing and maintining commercial and public safety communications systems. After a while, I opened my own shop repairing and selling televisions. I ran that for eight years and was offered a position as a field technician for a major electronics company. I could not resist, so I took it. Now, eight yeras later, I manage a group of field technicians for the same company. Two ruptured discs in my back ensure that I can't work on televisisions much anymore as we only work in-home, and sitting on a floor = not good for back issues.
 
I was married for a while, and divorced with no children. I got married for the second time last June and this time around is great!
 
In my spare time, I race on iRacing and cook dinner nightly for my wife. I am sweet like that! 😛
Userlevel 7
For a social media guy, I am, shockingly perhaps, not a big fan of being the center of attention, but I'll go ahead and chime in here. :)
 
There are also some short team bios over on the Meet the Community page.
 
This is not my first foray into forums.  Back in around 2001-2003, I ran a videogame forum that achieved some notoriety at the time.  It was a free site I made no money off of (I refused to put ads on it), and I discovered once I started college that I didn't have a whole lot of time for it anymore, so it sadly went the way of the dinosaurs after about a year of college. 
 
In college, I had a tendency to switch majors pretty frequently.  On the upside, that meant I took a wide range of diverse courses in everything from journalism to legal studies to business to economics and finally to philosophy, which is what my BA is in.  I love a good discussion about metaphysical certainty or virtue ethics, but symbolic logic was probably my favorite course.  It's like a puzzle, and it trains you to think analytically.
 
Following college, I returned to my roots and got back into computers, though this time not as a forum developer.  Instead, I was doing technical support.  Over at IBM I supported 12 different accounts all at the same time.  It was rather hectic!  Following that experience, I moved over to Webroot in 2010, and I've served a variety of roles here since coming on - most recently as Community Manager of this fine Community. :)
 
When I'm not at work, I like playing paintball as my favorite outdoor sport.  I'm a gamer with a PS3 and a decent PC rig.  I prefer tactical strategy games, but I'll play most anything.  I love anime, and I've got a nice list of suggestions for anyone looking for a good series.  Sometimes I'll feel the urge to play some music and jam on my keyboards, though I'll more frequently program them to play something on my computer.  My grasp of music theory is pretty good, but I'm a klutz when it comes to playing an instrument manually.  Luckily, midi programming lets me cheat!  Colorado has a great craft beer scene I enjoy, and my favorite kind of beer is a barleywine.  I have two cats, which I keep indoors in order to keep my small army of rabbits safe in the backyard.
Userlevel 7
I don't know how much I will write here.. I hate to talk about myself.
 
Born in 1970, I am not the youngest one here, but not the oldest.  I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and moved to rural Kentucky after graduating High School.
 
You all might not believe this, but I am actually usually the quiet and shy type.  (People at work would not believe it either I think)  I have long had an interest in computers, having started off with doing some Basic programming on the Sinclair ZX81 computer my dad put together from a mail order kit.  I am not talking about the Timex-Sinclair here.. that came after Timex bought Sinclair out and improved it to a whopping 2 Kb memory.  Ours had 1.  I will never forget how proud we were when we got the external memory expansion and had the unheard of power of 16K!
 
I continued playing with a Commodor 64 during high school, and occasionally my brothers Tandy.  While I enjoyed it, I was a lightweight.  I did simple stuff in Basic, and never really progressed much past that.  When I left Chicago for Kentucky, I was computerless for a couple of years.
 
When I decided I had had enough of using my electronic typewriter (It was a nice one... it had MEMORY and very basic word processing built in!), my Dad sent down his now outdated 386, or maybe it was a 286.  I used it, enjoyed it, and then decided I wanted to try to upgrade it a bit.  At the time, my brother who is 3 years older than I am, was more into computers than myself and he had some experience tinkering with upgrading them.  I gave a call about how to add something.. I think a 3.5" floppy drive.  Dear brother told me that it was too complicated for him to explain it to a computer newbie.
 
The gaunlet was down, and I did some reading.  I discovered that my brother was being lazy: it really did not sound all that complicated.  Within the next year I had added that wonderful high capacity floppy drive, and had also ended up mail ordering a 486 CPU, mainboard and RAM combo.  Bye bye 286, I am in the big leagues now!
 
I have never once in my life had a really state of the art computer.  I continued fiddling and playing at home, and then came the internet.  I was hooked.  This was in the mid to late 90's.  Back in those days, web pages were pretty simple and plain compated to what we have today.  I decided to try my hand at it.  I still had never done an actual programming other than in Basic.  I got some books, and began to learn HTML.  I managed to get some crude material put together, but when I uploaded it to a server, it broke.  I had been doing it all off my own hard drive, and I did not have the structure correct.  It ran fine off my drive, but not from a server.  I was confused.
 
I talked to the fellow I had my internet service through.  It was a small, local, one man shop of an ISP.  He explained the problem: all my links to my images and other pages contained literal paths C:/... etc etc.  He told me how to use relative paths.  That helped, but I was still pretty new and green and still could not get everything to work the way I wanted.
 
Enter computer #2.  I built little underpowered Linux machine.  It took me a few weeks, and a bit of phone time with my local ISP guy, but eventually I had my own web server at home networked to my PC so I could test my web pages at home.
 
I had enough fun by this time learning how to upgrade my computer, fix it, etc etc that a couple of friends and I decided to open a little computer shop.  We had a huge amount of fun doing computer repair, and building customer computers.. and we were pretty good at it too.  Not a one of our computers died in under 2 years, and most ran much longer.  We opened up the shop in early 1999, and managed to keep it open until early 2001.  While we made enough to pay the bills, this small town already had 2 other more established computer shops, and there really was not enough market for a 3rd at that time.  So we paid the bills, had fun, and did good work, but never brought home an income.
 
Fall of 2000, that little one man ISP I was using moved his office to just around the corner from the computer shop.  And he was needing some help.  So.. now I worked part time for him, and part time at my shop.  By early 2001, i was full time at the ISP, and we decided to close the shop.  In our little now 2 man ISP, we peaked at around 750 dialup customers.  He did the billing, most of the server maintenance, and networking jobs for local businesses.  I did the internet tech support, computer repair, and computer building.  Now that was a FUN job... and i was pretty good at it.  I have a number of funny stories that come from being internet tech support, maybe I will share those sometime.  OVer the phone support was fun, and I was good at it: I once talked a lawnmower repair man who had no computer knowledge and had never opened a computer case through changing a modem over the phone.  OK.. I have to give credit where credit is due.. I would not try that with anyone BUT him... while he had no experience with computers, he is very mechanically inclined and intelligent.  Plus.. he can follow directions without trying to get ahead of me or guess what he should do next.
 
While there I learned basic Linux administration, more HTML, did some javascript, perl and php too.  My own web page, while crude under today's standards ended up being very cutting edge for the day.  Instead of having a graphically static navigation bar at the top of the page, I spent a bit of time with javascript and created a navbar on the left margin of the page that floated down as you scrolled, so it was always available.  It was nothing but a small tab that said "Menu".  When you clicked on it, the entire menu slid out from the left side to the middle of the page.  When a link was clicked, it would slide back in, and then launch the link to load the requested page.  Pretty simple these days, but it was the first web page I have ever seen with that kind of function.
 
The ISP, by late 2003, was stuggling.  DSL was starting to come to our rural area, and the boss ended up selling out the dialup business to the local phone co-operative.  They ran our only major competition.  They had dialup, but also were starting to roll out DSL services too.  
 
If you have read all of this, you might notice I never mentioned taking any computer classes or a college degree in computing science.  I have never taken any computing classes at all.
 
I have done a number of jobs since then, as well as a good bit of time unemployed due to health reasons.  
 
I now work at what is called a "Customer Contact Center".  I am not a supervisor, but I do have a very fun and challenging job.  I do back end support for the on the phone agents.  We provide support for a large retailer, and I have the fun job of being a back end troubleshooter, and contact point between our site and the client, as well as some of the vendors.  Nothing glorious or fancy, but I love what I do.
 
I have not done any web page design for years now.. Now that I am married with 3 kids (11, 8 and 4) I do not have as much free time, and to be honest my skills, while impressive for the day, are just not up to par for today's standards.  I do still do some computer repair and troubleshooting for a few people who were clients of either my old shop or that little ISP.
 
I have really enjoyed being here on this community, because I really do enjoy helping others out when I can.  While I have not done direct customer support for a while, I always enjoyed it, and it is fun to learn what I can here and pass along that knowledge (in the rare occurrence that I have the right answer).
 
Looks like I just wrote a whole lot more than i inteded to, so I guess I better stop here!
Userlevel 7
DavidP, when will that be out in paperback?
 
😃
Userlevel 7
@ wrote:
DavidP, when will that be out in paperback?
 
:D
Corey, David has posted just a preambule. Stay tuned ... :D
 
Just kidding, everybody who has written more words than me has my sincere admiration.
Userlevel 7
@ wrote:
@ wrote:
DavidP, when will that be out in paperback?
 
:D
Corey, David has posted just a preambule. Stay tuned ... :D
 
Just kidding, everybody who has written more words than me has my sincere admiration.
Yeah.. sorry about that.  I was pretty tired.  When I am tired I tend to ramble on a bit :S
Userlevel 6
It would really be helpful to have an edit and delete function on this thread that is retained indefinitely.  JimM, can you help us out here?  :@
 
I think I had made this suggestion before, but I was shot down.    I'm an old dude and I tend to make a lot of typos and have too many brain farts!  This will happen to you, too, Jim, when you're my age!  ;)  Perhaps WSA's policy should be reviewed.  Maybe an exception for senior citizens or disabled veterans?  😛
Userlevel 7
Hey folks, no reason to apologize! Everyone who wrote an article here deserves the high appreciation because nowadays it's not so usual people are willing to uncover their personal information on the internet. Look at other forums out there, they are all hidden behind nicknames and are very cautious to say something about their privacy.
Userlevel 6
Pegas, Amen to that, brother!  😃
Userlevel 7
@ wrote:
It would really be helpful to have an edit and delete function on this thread that is retained indefinitely.  JimM, can you help us out here?  😠
I was able to change the time limit on the ability to edit one's own post to one week.  That should help for cases like this.  🙂
Userlevel 6
Thanks, Jim. 😃
Userlevel 7
Who's the man? JimM is the man!
Userlevel 6
Come on, folks, let's see some more participation on this thread!  😠
Userlevel 7
Badge +35
I am a Colorado native, born in the tiny mountain town of Allenspark, and have lived in the front range area for my whole life. I do love living here, but am really interested in seeing the rest of the world so I've made a point to travel as much as possible. I've seen most of the US, been to Mexico a few times, have travelled around western Europe a little (including 2 months in Ireland), and am planning to go to Canada before too long. Travel is really my favorite topic of conversation, since I like hearing about where other people have travelled and since that is a good way to get ideas for where I should go in the future.
 
I've worked a Webroot for a really long time, but mostly in various marketing roles so I'm actually not as technical as most of the other folks who work here. I do enjoy playing old school video games on new systems (Super Mario Bros on the Wii U) with my kids, and getting outside as much as possible. I have three dogs - 2 mini dachshunds and a dachshund/bassett mix - and a cat, so it's a pretty full house most of the time. :D
Userlevel 7
@ wrote:
I have three dogs - 2 mini dachshunds and a dachshund/bassett mix - and a cat, so it's a pretty full house most of the time. :D
Welcome to the Webroot Affiliation Club of Animal Lovers :D
Userlevel 3
And I (and my kids) I have 3 dogs, 2 cats, a hamster and 2 aquariums 🙂
Userlevel 6
Who would have thought that this topic would morph into an animal lovers' thread? That's OK by me!   I guess animals are a greater part of our lives than many of us would like to admit. :D
Userlevel 7
Badge +26
I got a very fat cat and she good kitty and I love her so much ;)
 
 
I also am into tons of techy stuffs. I love it and It's what keeps me going. 
 
Also cats and good EDM music does as well... and good food. 
 
I eat a lot and I specifically love pasta and meat. 
 
I also run a quirky blog http://remixedcat.blogspot.com and on the prowl for more graphics challenges! Got any for me? let me know!!!! 
Userlevel 6
Hi my name is Barry and I am a 40 year old male from the netherlands , actually I live in fairly close proximity of the german border. In the past I was an AVG hall of famer / guru ( 2011-2014 ) had some golden times with them and do have no regrets about that , but stepped down because I did not like they way they where heading. actually the small vip community started to die out little by little and there where a lot of changes in community  managers. in my free time I love to help friends / colleagues / family members with their malware related computer problems. My close friends call me scary harry because my addiction to the 80s slasher genre! last year I got married and recently I have bought a house so that takes up quite a bit of my time! I am so glad I have found this community , I really like it here! love the hospitallity 🙂 so amazingly nice and knowledgable people here! cheers!

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