A Short Description of Myself
I’m 52 years old, and currently live in Austin, Texas. I was born and grew up in Riverside, California, but had been trying to leave ever since I graduated from high school. Unlike nearly everyone else in Southern California, I like LA, and my major goal in life had been to move here. However, I finally left the state as an economic refugee due to the profound hatred shown by all levels of California government towards the productive class.
I attended Riverside Community College for three years, followed by another year and a half at Cal Poly Pomona, majoring in Computer Information Systems. I did not graduate – the increasing rates in the Cal State system overtook my father’s ability to pay about two quarters short of graduation.
I worked for three years in the Quality Assurance Department at Davidson & Associates, Inc. and Blizzard Entertainment, related companies owned by a confusing array of owners over the years. Quality Assurance has the job of finding bugs, reporting them to the programmers, and generally acting as whipping boys and menial labor for the rest of the company. Good QA is vitally important to the success of a product, a fact that was widely unappreciated by the other people involved in development.
After that I worked for The Workbook, a company which publishes samples of photographers’ and illustrators’ work. They also sell stock photographs. My main responsibility was Frontier programming for the web page, and I also did internal development using Filemaker Pro, REALbasic, and AppleScript. They didn’t pay very well for a programming job, so I left after nine months.
I then worked for Symantec Corporation for sixteen years, starting in quality assurance and then moving on to do configuration management for over 500 projects. The work environment started out much better than my previous jobs (I had actual personal space, and they supplied free Mountain Dew), but it went slowly downhill for years, and took a huge turn for the worse when the company relocated from Santa Monica to Culver City in 2008. I worked from home after that, until Symantec decided to fire their remote workers in 2015.
Next I had a short contract at Apple as a Maps Data Test Engineeer.
After spending some time looking around for a job I would be happy with, I took a contract with Integrity Digital Solutions. Originally it was a six month contract, but after a couple contact extensions I ended up working there for just under a year. After another delay, I took another contract job with TestLauncher.
Although I'm no longer looking for a job, here’s my résumé. There’s also a PDF version available for download.
My major interests are photography, computer games, science fiction, and shooting. I spend hours each day connected to the Internet reading news and web-browsing, working on various obscure programming projects, and reading. I also have a small collection of animation cels, and some old pages of designs for the Mekton RPG.