Here's a little history about the path I've taken on my way to the current position of being an internet consultant.

My career started in 1984, while working my way through engineering school. After the usual part-time jobs that many teenagers endure, I landed a summer intern job with Honeywell's Marine Systems Division in West Covina, CA. This division was responsible for designing and building submarine sonars and missiles for various navies around the world. I was responsible for counting resistors and capacitors and loading backup tapes on computers. It was boring for me, but there was a ton of exciting work going on at Honeywell. I just wasn't ready to do any of it, yet. The internship ended after a few months, but I made it back into Honeywell a year or so later on a more permanent basis.

As you might guess, military contractors in the 1980's were blessed with big projects and huge budgets for computer systems. I was studying to be a hardware engineer, but software had become more intriguing to me at the time. I bought my own computer (an Apple //e) and started programming right away. I became a small systems (Lisa, Mac and PC) administrator in 1985, helping to support and upgrade a couple hundred computers. In 1986 I was sent to Singapore for 5 months to help setup and configure a few computer systems for a new project.

When I returned I began learning more about larger systems. I was trained to manage a Data General system, performing backups, loading software, replacing components, etc. A year or so later, I was managing a couple VAX clusters and writing programs for a variety of projects in a few different languages. I began exchanging emails with colleagues on the internet around that time. I was also doing a lot of image processing work using IDIMS for a military weapons trainer. The trainer was for the GBU-15 Guided Bomb Unit. If you've seen the footage from Desert Storm with bombs being guided into targets, that's what we worked on.

In 1989, Hughes Aircraft bought the Honeywell division I was at. I took a position at another Hughes facility in Long Beach. I began learning all about UNIX systems at that time. Within a few months I was in a secured lab and became a UNIX system admin, mostly out of necessity. Our main project was a flight simulator that allowed everything from tanks to helicopters to be inserted into a scene and manipulated. It was a big project, with about 120 people working on it. I was learning a new image processing package called EASI by PCI. It was exciting and arguably one of the most advanced simulators ever designed. Sadly, it never saw the light of day. Hughes had put $45 million into it and missed their window of opportunity. Layoffs were announced and everybody jumped ship.

A couple of us landed in Woodland Hills at a place I'd rather not remember :-)

Fast forward to 1992 when I married my wife, Rhonda, and moved to my hometown of Covina, CA. I began working on satellite ground stations at Aerojet in Azusa. I was also introduced to IDL and PV-WAVE, two very capable image processing packages. I worked mostly with DMSP and T2 meteorological satellite data, and developing applications to analyze the data and view the imagery using IDL. Aerojet hit tough times and announced hiring freezes and layoffs.

In late 1993, I found myself at another Hughes Aircraft facility in Santa Barbara, CA. They were developing a new HyperSpectral sensor called the Wedge Imaging Spectrometer (WIS). Satellites often have 5 or 10 imaging bands, and are called MultiSpectral. WIS collected data across a maximum of 722 imaging bands. Here's one way to put that into perspective: your typical computer monitor can display 24 bits of color for every pixel on the screen, WIS provided over 8000 bits of color for every pixel. I developed an application for WIS that was entered into a contest run by the people that developed the IDL programming language. The application won first prize, which was a $1500 IDL license. My manager at Hughes discovered it would cost more to put the free package into the Hughes system than it would cost to purchase it directly. He told me to take it home :-)

Shortly afterwards, Hughes was going to shut down the Santa Barbara plant and move everyone to El Segundo. That decision cost them about 50% of their staff, including me. I became a contractor at that point. What I quickly discovered was that I had acquired a wide-ranging skill set. Those skills have been expanding and currently encompass internet applications, web design and image processing.