Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Five Things You Didn't Know About Me
Tagged by Pete.
- My birthday is coming up this weekend. Gifts, birthday cards, MacBooks, etc. are welcome.
- I grew up outside of Albany, New York, the second of four children. We were part of a large extended Irish-German family. As a child I wasn't always thrilled about the chaos and noise. Now that we all live far apart, I miss that.
- I'm left-handed. It's not a big deal now but it was an issue when I was a kid. It made learning to write more difficult. Likewise when learning to play baseball, hockey, bowling, etc. It's hard to teach a left-hander when you're right-handed. I'm discovering the same issue in reverse with my two right-handed sons.
- For several summers in high school and college I worked at a meat packing plant. Hog trucks arrived at one end of the plant, various meat and meat byproducts were shipped out from the other end. You probably don't want to know too much about what went on inside. It was dirty and smelly work. But it paid union-level wages. And there's something satisfying about physical labor. I also had a side job during the summers working for a company that printed and distributed marketing flyers. We assembled flyers in a dingy warehouse and then dropped them off to carriers who would put them on doorsteps and in mailboxes. The job paid slightly more than minimum wage. For many people working there, this wasn't a summer job, it was their only job. Working there and at the meat packing plant meant meeting some really interesting characters. And I don't mean that in a pejorative way. When you just stick to people in your own world, you miss out.
- In my professional life, I've always been a software developer. This wasn't my original career goal, it just worked out that way. I was interested in gadgets as a child. I liked to take things apart and see how they worked. I followed this interest in college; receiving Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Mechanical Engineering. But ever since high school, I was also interested in programming. In fact, my Master's Thesis was primarily the design and implementation of Mechanical CAD software. When I began interviewing, I found that many of the jobs in Mechanical Engineering didn't hold my interest. So I interviewed at a couple of software companies. I accepted a job at Applicon, building CAD software. I think I made the right career choice and I don't regret my educational choices. Software is still an evolving field. I've found that having an engineering background has been very helpful. Just don't ask me to work with Navier-Stokes equations, I've forgotten most of what I learned about fluid dynamics. Fortunately, they haven't come up recently.
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