Weblog of a "Switcher"

My life started here in St. Louis back in August of 1960. I’ve had a pretty uneventful life from then. 1979 saw my first computer arrive. An Apple ][. I got that, plus 32K ($150 per 16K!), 2 (count’em) 51/2″ floppy disk drives for the totally cheap price of $2,600! It’s amazing how much the computer industry has changed in the last 28 years.

At that time, I was working for Parkway School District in their Data Processing department. I operated an IBM 360 Model 30 and did a little programming on the side for them.

During that time, I studied the Apple as much as I could. Learned how to program it in both BASIC’s and assembly language. About that time, I learned about a job at an Educational Software company called Milliken Publishing. They wanted a bunch of software written for Apple personal computers. So I started writing software there. I put out so much software there it’s hard to keep track. I write about a dozen small games in a pretty short time. One I managed to get finished in less than 24 hours. I also worked on some larger full packages. Sadly, all the Apple// stuff is long gone.

I left Milliken to work at St. Louis University Medical Center helping out doctors working to become Cardiologists with research papers and analysis software. It was an interesting place to work. I learned a lot there including C and started working with IBM PC clones.

Oddly, enough, I returned to Milliken for a while. Started working on Apple// software again, then convinced the bosses that Apple// software was pretty much dead and we started converting the massive number of Apple programs to DOS.

After a bunch of years doing that, I found this game company that is based in St. Louis and got a job there. Simutronics made and operates a couple of MMORPG’s. GemStone IV and DragonRealms are their premier products. This was a great experience for myself. I learned a lot about client/server interaction, maintaining servers that need to be up as much as possible, even writing some front-end code for a few of them. I learned Linux, C++, Java to name a few computer languages. This has to have been the best place I have ever worked and if I had the opportunity to a “do-over”, I would have never left there. All the folks that work there are just amazing people and really friendly. I still get together with them now even though it’s been over 7 years. It helps that I met my wife there and she still works there, but even if that were not the case, I think that I would have kept in touch with them. A really great bunch of people. I really miss some of them badly, Roger, Suz, Nora; you all passed away way too young! Others I miss simply moved on to other jobs out of state. I myself moved on as well, but stayed here in St. Louis.

The next company I worked for promised I would lead their development push to the web. It was another Educational Software company called Siboney Learning Group. That promise didn’t seem to pan out and due to poor management, the company pretty much floundered.

Right before I was let go, I started work on their “eLearning” initiative. I wasn’t leading the push, which is fine with me, I’m not much for leading a team. I was happiest when I was programming. I don’t know how well their “eLearning” concept went. Last I heard, their business model was still going to be to sell their products once. No updates, no subscriptions. How they planned to pay for the bandwidth that running servers would cost them I just don’t know.

Their business model required them to find new school systems to sell to all the time and they also needed to put out new software as often as possible. How did they accomplish this? They repackaged their existing software and sold it under a different name. They also bought out other smaller educational software houses. The final stupidity was to apply their normal business plan to the eLearning stuff. They would sell a 50 seat license just once. This would probably work to allow them to buy the necessary servers to keep the software up, but they didn’t seem to understand the concept of bandwidth and the costs associated with that. I don’t know what they are doing with that software since I don’t really have any contacts there. Not nearly the happy bunch I know at Simutronics. They are a publicly traded company (SBON.ob), and their stock managed to hit a high of just under a dollar a share. Currently (3/29/08), the stock price is floundering at 10¢ a share. I bought a bunch of options at 55¢ a share. Needless to say, I’m taking quite a hit.

I was out of work for 8 months when I found my last job at SirsiDynix. It’s not nearly as fun as writing Educational software or Online games, but it paid the bills. SirsiDynix makes software that Libraries use to keep track of their catalogs, checked out books, and a bunch of other tasks. It’s a massive program. We use Java and are currently using Intellij’s IDEA IDE and IBM’s Eclipse IDE for development.

Well, that pretty much runs through my history with computers and programming. Once I started with IBM clones, I stuck with them. I did do some cross-platform work with Siboney, so I bought a PowerMac G4 dual processor system. I had that for about 4 months. I sold it to Siboney when I just couldn’t keep it up and running as well as my Windows boxes. I worked in Windows under versions from 3.1 to XP for over 12 years. It was Vista that broke the Windows chain.

I started my interest in Macintosh back in May of ‘06 when Microsoft released it’s first public beta of Vista. I took one look at it and decided it was time for a change. They spent 5 years working on Longhorn/Vista and all they had to show for it was an OS that did all the things that OS X Tiger (10.4) did already. Microsoft pulled out more and more features that might have made it distinct from OS X and when I saw it, I knew I would be going insane if I used it for any length of time.

I bought a MacBook first to make sure that I was really ready to make the switch. Our household was ready for a new notebook with an older 1GHz P4 limping along. I pretty much fell in love with it instantly. I use the MacBook more than I ever used a notebook before. I take it on trips now, I watch video podcasts while exercising, etc.

In August ‘06, Apple released the Mac Pro. I knew that they were going to be updating the PowerMac G5 since they had updated all the other computers to Intel. Almost as soon as the Mac Pro hit the street, I went to Apple’s store website and ordered it.

My interests are Gaming, Macintosh, OS X, programming in OS X, just about all things Mac and Apple. (Yes there is gaming in OS X and the Mac.)

I’m currently playing: World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Psyconauts, The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, assorted “casual” games like Ice Puzzle Deluxe and other games I have acquired thanks to Game Giveaway of the Day.

I can be contacted at: david2007 at metzener dot com.