- Dairy Queen: Ray gave me my first job, challenged me and gave me a lifetime of Dairy Queen stories and references.
- Berglund's Sporting Goods: Pete and Harold groomed my retail skills, taught me a great deal about everything outdoors and established some key life-long interests.
- Wilson & Company: Being a dishwasher in the cafeteria of a meat packing plant paid $2.00/hour and all the gore you could stand. My German WWII war bride manager continually tried to convince me that no one in Germany knew of the Holocaust.
- U.S. Army: 11B40 designation teaches you how to kill and how not to be killed. I am alive.
- Universal Milking Machine: Laboring on the factory floor and with my first management responsibilities (at 20) taught me lessons used throughout my career.
- University of MN...Data Center: First programming challenge (DEC PDP 8/L).
- University of MN...Teaching Assistant: Standing in front of an auditorium classroom requires preparation and confidence.
- Governor's Commission on Crime Control & Prevention: Heads-down data management and statistical analysis and the best group of people I ever worked with.
- MN Department of Public Safety: What more can be said than writing the "Minnesota Motorcycle Helmet Study" and "Minnesota Crash Facts" was the beginning of the end of government employment.
- Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Minnesota: Two weeks and I knew it was time to move on but...I had the opportunity to get my first exposure to personal computing (1980) and write an innovative medical claims analysis program with a rogue implementation of mainframe Basic.
- North Star Casualty Services: This was a good gig with an enthusiastic group of professionals, competing with very large companies as a start up.
- The 27-Year Gig: There is much to be said.
Around the Block
One of the advantages of having been around the block a few times is that you have been around the block. Without a major effort to be oblivious you learn things, hopefully taking the time to apply them. My first exposure to personal computers was in 1980. I worked for a large health insurance concern. Doing analysis of the data was quite difficult. All the systems in place were for claims processing, underwriting and billing. Our only tool was a report writer called ASSIST. How I remember that name I don't know. We'd fill out forms for ASSIST and send them via inter-office mail to someone who would key them on punch cards and submit the job. The report would come back in a couple of days. Usually you would make errors on the ASSIST forms. Turnaround was eternal. Somewhat undercover we visited a few other people who had purchased personal computers, kept them well hidden from corporate pundits but leveraged them for special analysis and purposes.
Over the course of the later gigs I was hands-on on the IBM 34, 36, 38 and was in an early adopter of the AS/400 following that through numerous hardware and software upgrades to the iSeries and then on to network servers, and then the evolution of virtualization and cloud services. Frankly it all ends where it began. Certainly personal computers have delivered computing to the masses, changed all of our lives and perhaps made us happier. From a technical point we're not applying to the personal computer world much of what the mainframe world mastered and deployed thirty-five or forty years ago.
As I sit here at home writing on a Samsung Chromebook, using Google's SAS 'Blogger' I'm reminded of a lot of time spent at a mainframe 'dumb terminal.' It seems that I've seen this before.
Monetization
My efforts have been a bit vertical and lacking integration. Historically as a reader I'd check each of my email accounts individually, monitory Twitter for a while, check into LinkedIn and read and post and of course check Facebook to see if any of my quips attracted attention. A dashboard for dealing with that would be more practical.
On the writing and creative side that would be likewise prudent. Yesterday and today I did research on integrating Blogger and Twitter (Blogger to Twitter). www.twitterfeed.com provides such integration and also to LinkedIn and Facebook. I'm not exactly sure how much of this particular blog needs to go to those other social media sinkholes. That's to be determined. Clearly there are many venues for adding viewers/readers and ultimately impacting monetary return.
"Sign Your Work"
A week or so ago a blog that I follow showed a repair of a leaking oil filter with a large hose clamp and a beer can. In the military that's called "field expediency." You use what you have to solve a problem or make a repair that allows the mission to continue. I thought it warranted recognition.
Another blog that I follow is Seth Godin. His focus is marketing, promotion and public relations and initiative and action. His posts are succinct, clearly done frequently in a practice of active writing. Some are very good, others of nominal or passing interest. Carpenters often sign their work, leaving names and dates on hidden components of dwellings and structures. Whenever I have a wall opened up I leave a record, as nominal as the work may be. Seth makes comment that more work should be signed. It's not limited to artists and songwriters. Often I find things in buildings that are placed in a particular location because it's logical (e.g. a place to hang a removed padlock) or a place to hang a tools where it is used, not where it is stored. The filter repair may have warranted some sort of hang tag with a name and date, too.
Summary
This is a test to see how the integration tool work.
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