About me
My introduction to computers began when I asked my dad for an Atari 2600. I never got one, but he did, soon after, buy an Atari 400. I remember going to Service Merchandise in Bristol, TN waiting for them to bring it out and him saying, "You want games boy? Make 'em yourself!"
Many years and hundreds of versions of "Guess the Number" games later, here I am.
Working at a small university for so long and with limited IT staff, I was fortunate in that I was able to carve my own path. Many of the enterprise services there were implemented by me and me alone.
See a need, fill a need
It's been said that I find solutions to problems that don't exist. As it turns out, however, I'm just ahead of the game. Here's the thing....at the end of the day, I'm also an end user of many of the services that I've established or support. Chances are, if I've found something that can be improved upon, other people have as well. So why not do something about it?
Here are a few examples of what I'm talking about:
- Lochbox - Faculty, staff and students couldn't access their home folders remotely without using VPN. While that wasn't a problem for most faculty and staff, students didn't have access to use VPN. So, I created, essentially, Dropbox for the university. It's a .Net based application with a Bootstrap front-end that allows users to access the campus file servers over HTTPS.
- Screen Drop for Lochbox - This is a desktop screen capture app that automatically a) saves the screen image to the user's home folder and b) presents a link to the image for copying/pasting.
- Screen Loch - We had a problem with students walking away from publicly accessible computers around campus without logging off. While there is no shortage of 3rd party apps to solve this problem, most were overkill. So, I wrote a desktop service which is pushed out via a GPO. It locks the screen after 1 minute of inactivity.
- Wemedy - Wemedy is a monster of an application that replaced Remedy. Back in 1990 something, we were using Remedy (which I also ran and developed for) to provide ITSM. As our IT department grew, so too did the need for licensing. It became cost prohibitive so I started developing what later became Wemedy. Initially, it was strictly ITSM based. However, since I was in a position to do so, I incorporated ITOM and a wee bit of HR onboarding.
- Unofficial Foodstirs Alexa Skill - I like food and I like Foodstirs approach at turning baking into a family affair. When I got my first Echo, the very first skill I started developing was a Foodstirs skill. The idea is that the general public could hear about the various baking kits Foodstirs offers. Customers would be able to do that plus review past orders as well as re-order items. I had a PoC ready to go. Since I obviously didn't have access to their Shopify account for pulling data live, I wrote a screen scaper in Python that hooked into my skill. Ready to go, I contacted Foodstirs and told them about it. They were in....or at least curious. But I think my 30 page e-mail explaining how it worked scared them away. Never heard from them again.
- RainbowBridge.org - I created this site way back in 1995 as a way to remember pets. Back then, people would snail mail me letters and, sometimes, pictures for me to transfer to the site. I would get these long, handwritten letters about how people missed their pets. I had to type all that stuff in and it wreaked havoc on my emotions. I was way more than happy to learn how to write CGI form handlers in Perl.
Gadgetry
I like gadgets, especially electronic gadgets. More than that, I like to make electronic gadgets. My SoC (System on a Chip) of choice is the ESP8266/NodeMCU. I also use Arduino Nanos quite a bit. And of course I have all kinds of Pi's...all the way to Zero's and Zero W's. I have two 3D printers to accommodate my insatiable appetite for making never-to-be-used gadgets. There are a whole lot of them and I'm not even going to try and list them here. Just know that I have loads of sensors and more than a few motors and servos.