1969 - 1973 Lick-Wilmerding High School (yes, I was accepted at Riordan but that was not my path as the saying goes)
1973 - 1975 College of Small Minds. Some of you just smiled, didn't you? What can I say, the price was right and the teachers were good.
1975 Summer is where things got interesting. As a result of work at the above mentioned "college" I was accepted at Cal-Poly SLO. Neat, having worked for the last 6 years or so I had saved up enough money to cover the costs. The problem, Intel offered me a job to design CMOS and PMOS but the folks that caught my fancy was a small group out in Livermore, a national lab across the street from the one most think about. The problem, instead of the summer job I asked for, they offered me a full time one with the additional temptation of... paying for me to go to school "later." Wow, double my wage, full time, health benefits, and a free education? I jumped at the opportunity. I bought a 1969 Mustang and headed "East" to start a new life. Later became much later for formal education but I learned my real education started in the Fall of 1975. Not much later the Lab actually pulled a war powers act on many of us to keep us working 12 hour days! That caused me to re-evaluate things and soon I was back in night school (SFSU this time).
1978 Married the love of my life, Linda
1980 Son, William, born
1983 Daughter, Lisa, born
1987 Both kids old enough that I no longer had to worry if they were playing out of sight or silently sooooooo I started night school at College of Notre Dame to complete my BSCS. There is a funny story about USF actually asking me not to go there because they were afraid I would challenge their teachers, hey working in Livermore was a *real* education and I had been playing with Crays for awhile. 8^) CND on the other hand said why do you want a BS and when I explained welcomed me with open arms. It turned out to be the right choice, my professor was a pupil of a Von Neumann pupil. Talking about education not far from the CS tree.
1989 Quit on the the fourteenth anniversary of starting work in Livermore and switched jobs (look when your Wife tells you to quit, you quit! And her reasons were sound though doing research gets under one's skin). I was now working for NASA at Moffett Field
1991 Graduated from CND and thought "Wow, no more calculus!!!!"
1999 Accepted into a NASA development program
2000 Worked in DC
2001 - 2003 MIT. Yes sleep is *highly* over rated. Lots of stories here (for one class I was part of a team competition that designed a supersonic business jet, our design won), a truly crazy place and yes there is still an Einstein there. Oh, and I was SOOOOOOOOO wrong about "no more calculus" above.
2007 back in DC again and working to help us get back to the moon and beyond (Buzz Lightyear, where are you?) Oh, and while being 2,704 miles away I was working on this other task... (http://www.teresahalton.com/justmarried/lisa_julian.html) My program management side of the brain requires me to state that the task was successfully completed on time and within budget. 8^)Oh yeah and less than a month before the aforementioned task was completed, Lisa completed her MS in Biomedical engineering at... Cal-Poly SLO, just as Will had done 3 years previous. So yes, I never went to SLO but both of my kids decided to. And their major ended up being an interesting blend of Linda (an RN) and myself (engineer). It is a great engineering school with a penchant for hands-on learning, but for many reasons (see 1978 above) I am happy I never went there.
2008 30th anniversary (yeah, not sure why she still puts up with me) was just celebrated!
That brings us up to today. I am still located at Ames Research Center but work part time for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate, Directorate Integration Office at HQ. So travel around the US working enterprise architecture issues for them is my reality. And yes, I have access to some real cool pictures like this one that was taken, ummm, not from land.
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