I have been primarily employed in IT since 1997. Back then, I managed to segue out of electronic repair by way of broadcast engineering. I have a degree in electronics, and worked on professional video equipment for JVC beginning in 1988. This was after a brief time on the assembly line at Compaq building some of their last 286 and early 386 machines.

I worked for several local industrial video suppliers back in the early nineties as a bench technician and installer. One of my managers in 1993 helped me find a job with the UT MD Anderson Cancer Center in their video production department. This department also manages the inhouse cable tv headend as well as virtually all of the video teleconferencing for MD Anderson and other organizations in the Houston, TX Medical Center.

To try to make our lives easier with the teleconferencing operations, I built a Linux machine to act as a terminal gateway to all of the associated equipment. This was around the beginning of the internet explosion (1995), so built in web interfaces to this equipment were rare or non-existent. I have been working with Linux ever since. That machine remained in service many years after I left.

Working with Linux at the time inspired me to gain as much basic knowledge as possible regarding the workings of the internet, especially TCP/IP and DNS. Soon after, the need for email began to grow, and everyone who was anyone began to have their own home page. It was amazing back then how little information was available for free. However, there was also a lot of information available which no one would publish willingly these days, including personal information on various companies' employees such as home addresses and phone numbers. Internet security was not the concern it certainly is now.

Later, I worked for KTXH (Channel 20 - UPN) and then KPRC (Channel 2 - NBC), and in both places was allowed to expand my IT knowledge. With KPRC, I was given the task of building up their inhouse internet connectivity including and especially email. I was also responsible for the early internet access to images from Doppler 2000 by way of a custom written application using RGB capture, image manipulation, and FTP. We used Windows NT and Exchange 5.5 for our inhouse systems. But the internet connection, mail gateway, firewall, and proxy servers were all using Linux

One of my bigger challenges at the time came from our TV friend, Conan O'Brien. He had found out that KPRC was delaying his broadcast until early in the morning, and requested that his viewers protest by email to KPRC. I was forced to work with some very basic tools, and quickly, to try to control how much of this email actually made it into people's mailboxes. While it did not impact our connection as badly as some of the first Doppler requests had, it was still a major issue - something we all now know as SPAM. Thanks, Conan!

After leaving broadcast, I worked as a Perl programmer and system administrator. I had also begun working with some large open source (free) PHP coding projects such as phpgroupware, and later egroupware in my spare time.

In 2001, I began working full time as a computer consultant for Lighthouse Consultants. During this time I came to understand and fight to maintain the best customer service possible. I learned that not only is communication with the customer critical to foster confidence, but that it is also something to look forward to. Working with my customers is not a necessary evil, but rather something I enjoy. While it is definitely the case that you need skills to be able to fulfill your promises, you also need to be able to communicate to be truly effective.

This is the experience I have brought to my own company, Groupwhere Consulting. I look forward to the opportunity to help you and your company maintain a successful interface to your internal systems as well as with your customers by way of technology.