I grew up in Plainfield, NH
I was an honor grad and member of the National Honor Society at Henniker HS, Henniker, NH
After high school, I banged around and had fun learning to be an auto mechanic at my second cousin's gas station, but it wasn't a long term solution.
So, I joined the USAF, and was stationed at McGuire AFB, NJ as a C-141 cargo plane crew chief. I applied repeatedly for a transfer to SEA (Southeast Asia), but they wouldn't let me go, because my AFSC (job) was short-staffed. After a few years of that, I applied for crosstraining into the field I had originally wanted when I joined the Air Force; Electronic Technician. It was approved, and I was sent to Keesler AFB, MS for 6 months of electronic technician training.
After the training, I got an "early out", because the war in VietNam had ended and the Air Force had more people than they needed. The Electronic Tech training was one of the smartest moves I ever made. I had joined the Air Force to get GI Bill money to go to college, but after I got out, I always made more money as an electronic tech than most college graduates. I saw little point in taking time out from earning money to spend money to go to school so I could graduate and make less money than I had before starting! There was a great deal of demand for experienced techs in those days. And those were "real" techs, not today's boardswappers.
I lived in Nashua, NH & worked as an electronic technician and Field Service Engineer. As a FSE, at first I couldn't believe I was doing all that expense-paid travel and getting paid for it, too! But after awhile, living in hotels does get old. I did a lot of good travel, though, and saw and did some neat stuff. I've worked in nearly every major US port city.
I was getting pretty burned out on all the NH snow, and California was the "Magic Land", home to all the hot rod and motorcycle magazines, shops, and activities I'd been reading about for so long, so I had to go check it out for myself. I was heavily into high performance cars and auto racing, especially roadracing, in those days. So, I moved to Orange County, CA in the late 70s, and worked as an electronic technician. There is SOOO much to do there! Anything you want to do or get - it's right there. The weather is incredibly good year-round, especially in coastal Orange County, and I loved going to the desert and National Forests for dirt bike riding. It's quite crowded there, too. The traffic can be horrendous, even with their outstanding freeway system. And now each year Kalifornia becomes progressively more liberal and socialist, with their ever-expanding stupid and onerous anti-gun laws.
In the late 70s and early 80s, I was getting interested in the new world of small computers. Long before anyone had heard the term "PC", I had built my own computer from components, soldering chips onto printed circuit boards, and putting all the pieces together to make something that actually did something useful. Those were the days of paper tape readers, 120 pound 5 MB hard drives that drew 10 amps of current, and having (8) 8 KILO byte memory cards fully populated with chips was a "loaded" system. That was the heyday of MITS, Altair, and the CP/M world. I never hosted a Bulletin Board System (BBS), one of the early information sharing systems, but I used to spend a lot of time dialed into them (at an incredible 300 baud!)
During the early 80s, being an electronic tech was no longer as lucrative as it had been. SoCal was flooded with lots of cheap foreign labor, especially the Vietnamese refugees flooding into Orange County, who were willing to do the electronics tech work, as well as electronic assembly, for peanuts. "Little Saigon" was formed 1/4 mile from my house - very annoying. Components were becoming much cheaper, so techs no longer troubleshot to the chip level. An era began in which malfunctioning computers or other electronic devices were just troubleshot to which circuit board was causing the problem, then the board was sent out for repair at some specialized repair shop, with the aforementioned cheap techs doing the work.
I began looking to do something better, so I started a motorcycle accessories shop (BC Cycle Supply) in 1981. Later, I also started a gun shop, a computer store, and a computer consulting business (The Computer Wizard) . These were convenient for me, because I was able to establish them all in a small shopping center just across the street from my house in Westminster, CA. It was while I had the stores that I started USING computers, rather than fixing them. It was also during this time that a salesman at one of the very first software stores showed me a demo of a cool new program I could use for my store inventory; dBASEII. I was hooked! I've been a database guy of one sort or another ever since.
By the end of 1984, though, I knew I wanted to get rid of the stores, and just concentrate on being a computer consultant. I sold the stores in 1985. Then I decided to take a break from working and do some long-awaited adventures.
In the fall of 84, I had run the Barstow to Vegas motorcycle desert race. Toward the end, I crashed and broke my leg (I got back up and finished, though). While recuperating from the broken leg, I read a book about the Green Berets and thought I'd really missed out by never doing any "real" military stuff or going to Vietnam. Being in the Air Force was just like a civilian job, except I happened to work on planes at a military base. In fact, at least half of my coworkers there at McGuire AFB, NJ were civilians!
I decided to join the Army and get into the Green Berets. The recruiter was highly skeptical when I came in there on crutches with a leg cast, and said I wanted to join up. He apparently decided I must be a mental case, so he sent me to their testing facility to take the ASVAB, the military's vocational aptitude battery of tests. He was flabbergasted when he got the results back. He said it was the highest scores, in every area, that he'd ever seen. So, he started doing a bit more for me, but I'm sure he still thought it must be a prank. While many weeks went by working with that recruiter, I decided one day to check out the Marines and see if perhaps they had some hard-ass unit like the Green Berets. It turned out they had a unit called Recon, so I decided they were probably even more hardcore than the Green Berets, and I decided to forget the Army and go for the Marines.
The Marine recruiters did not take me seriously at all, especially the first time I pulled up to the recruiting station, driving my Porsche 911 and wearing a 3 piece suit! Eventually, I was able to convince them that I was not kidding. Once I got the recruiters going for me, the Marine Corps turned me down, and said I was too old (mid-30s then). I complained to my Congressman, and eventually, after many interviews with various officers, was allowed to enlist and go to Marine Corps Boot Camp. They were sure I'd bomb out, but they finally relented, saying it would only cost them a bus ticket to send me home when I couldn't hack it with the young studs. Then, I asked about getting a 3 year enlistment, instead of the usual 4 years. I figured that, if it turned out to be the big mistake everyone was saying it would be, enduring it for 3 years was better than 4 years. At first, they said "not available", but then they said that, after all I'd been through for so long, trying to get in, I could have a 3 year enlistment if I wanted it.
While waiting to go into Marine Corps Boot Camp, I was working out a lot, and came up with what I thought at the time was a unique, "Brian-type" idea (I'd never heard of it before); riding a bicycle all the way across the country by myself. So, I did it. I found out later it wasn't all that unique, as many people have done it. But anyway, it was a great adventure, and I completed it just in time to go to Marine Corps Boot Camp.
I wrote a "book" on my adventures doing the cross-country bike trip and going through Marine Corps Boot Camp, but I never polished or published it.
So, I joined the
USMC for some adventure in the late
80s. Ooh-rah! I was the boot camp series high shooter and was selected as the only ITS
(Infantry Training School) Marine in my unit to be meritoriously promoted as the platoon
honor grad. I was also selected for Recon training while in ITS. I was later in the "grunts" (infantry),
as well as Scout/Sniper training and being a Combat Motorcycle Instructor. There was some good stuff, especially the aforementioned, and
some good combat patrol training in Okinawa and the Philippines,
as well as a couple memorable desert training exercises at 29 Palms, CA
with the motorcycles. But there was just WAAAAY too much mind-numbing
drudgery, especially in an infantry line company, so I got out at the end of my
enlistment, and went back into computers, with a job as a database programmer.
While in the Marine Corps, I began teaching myself the "new" MSDOS operating system, as my beloved CP/M was rapidly fading. At first, I hated giving up all the shareware that was available for CP/M, but the MSDOS stuff was coming in fast. I got my first PC-XT in '87, and thought its capacity (30MB) and modem (2400) were something way beyond what I'd ever dreamed of having.
After getting out of the Marine Corps, I joined the US Marine Corps Reserve, because I didn't want to be "completely" out of the Corps. I served there as a Sergeant in the 2/23 Surveillance & Target Acquisition Platoon in Encino, CA, until I moved back to NH.
I moved back to Cornish, NH to live deep in the woods in 1990, and worked as a Tech Support Manager and IS (Information Systems) Manager. I really love the peace & quiet & being in the woods, being with nature, and working on my tree farm. See my LOCAL page for more info on the local area.
I now do Oracle database consulting. I am an Oracle Applications DBA. There's always more to learn in the Oracle world, so it's a constant challenge, and I enjoy the work very much. There used to be a lot of demand for high tech workers.
In 2000, the US "gummint" tripled the number of H-1B visa (foreign, temporary) high tech workers allowed into the US. Shortly thereafter, the economy started drying up, mainly due to the dot-com meltdown. By mid-2001, it had gotten very hard to find new work, but the foreigners are still here, stealing the American jobs by charging half as much as Americans. The H1B visa law says they have to be paid full American wages, but it's all a big scam, and the corporations fight for the H-1Bs so they can lay off Americans and bring in the foreign nationals. After Sept 11, the economy has really tanked, and seems to just keep getting worse, but the foreigners are still here to steal jobs & bomb buildings. Maybe it will improve; maybe the Feds will smarten up & send the foreigners home; more likely it will turn out like the Vietnamese taking over the electronic tech market in SoCal in the late 70s & early 80s.
2002 was even worse than 2001. All the IT jobs are drying up, and many people I know in the Information Technology field are losing their jobs, while the H-1B foreigners are still here, taking the few remaining jobs for half what Americans get paid. It's especially bad in the Oracle world; it's all non-citizens from India now. See my OUTSOURCING and IMMIGRATION pages for more details on all this.
I love big, complicated projects and major challenges. One very big one that was lots of fun and challenge (besides designing & building my house ) was designing and building my wind generator and 135 foot tall tower . The whole project took 3 years and cost me 4-5 times what I had initially thought it would. I should work for the government!
One of the many big challenges was getting the 12 yards of concrete for the anchor bases out into the woods where the tower is located. But I built roads and more, and got it done! It went on line in the fall of 1996. I had lived on PV (photovoltaic solar electric panels) power for several years, but the available power was pretty slim in the winter. The tower and wind gen were a great success, and now I always have more than enough power. I used to have to run a generator every other day in the winter. Now, I never need to run it.
I already had a 36' wide attached garage and a full basement shop, but they were getting quite full, so my next big project was building a 100 foot wide detached steel building . I bought a "pre-engineered" steel building and erected it myself. There was a lot of site work to be done, including filling in a small ravine, as well as drilling, chipping, and blasting some ledge high spots out of the way. I started doing the site work for that in the summer of 1997. By the summer of 1999, I had gotten all the site work done and received the building kit. I had the building mostly done by the time snow came late that year in January of 2000. I finished it up in the summer of 2000.
Toward the end of 2001, I decided to get my Private Pilot's license, which I got May 30, 2002. After that, I decided my long term flying needs would best be met by a new big project; building my own plane. Building the plane is covered in a sub-site HERE.
