What do you like most about each of your siblings?

 My only older sibling, by about three and a half years, Greg could have easily ignored me but instead included me when I’m sure others would not.  My second-floor bedroom, in an unairconditioned house, was pretty warm in the summer, so I asked Greg if I could move down to the basement with him, and he agreed.  The other major inclusion Greg allowed was to go camping with him and his friends at their Bus, which they bought and parked along the Stillwater River west of Troy, Ohio.  A little leary at first, the group accepted me and found that having someone to drive them into town for more beer Saturday night was very useful. 

My sister Mary Rose was the only girl and just fifteen months younger than myself, so it was natural for us to grow up playing together and I remain closer to her than my other siblings.  Like our mother, Mary Rose is very sweet, kind, and giving of herself.  At one point when I suddenly needed a place to live, she opened her home to me and let me work through my situation.  Mary Rose is the thoughtful one, always the one to host family get-togethers and never forgetting to call and wish us a Happy Birthday or a Merry Christmas.  

Martin is the musician and actor of the family.  All the boys seem to have inherited our parent's desire to perform, and while all of us like getting up in front of an audience to teach or perform, Martin has taken it way further than the rest of us.  Our parents met at the Dayton Blackfriars Guild where they both acted on stage, and like our parents, he’s active in a theater group in Tucson, Arizona.  Martin, like Greg, is a lefty, and also plays guitar right-handed and jams far better than Greg or me.  

David is the youngest, two years younger than Martin, so they also grew up together, but unlike the nice brother/sister relationship I had with Mary Rose, Martin and David were quite often at odds with each other and argued quite a bit.  He’s the real programmer between us, so while I performed smaller efforts, David has delivered and supported very large and complex programs, including external websites.  

What is the most valuable thing you learned from being a parent?

I think I paid closer attention to my children than anyone else ever, in fact, I’ve told many people that the key to parenting is exactly that, paying attention.  When you know what’s going on and you know your children, the rest isn’t rocket science.  What that taught me that’s so valuable is how very different people are from each other and how they change over time.  My son and daughter are very different people, wonderful in their own unique ways, with their own set of challenges, skills, and preferences.  Maybe I should have known that’s how people are, but I never paid close enough attention to notice until it was my job to be a parent.

I began really listening to people in order to find out how they viewed the world, their work, and their ideas of fun and happiness.  Not at just one point frozen in time, but how they changed as they grew older and wiser.  It was particularly useful at work and as I got a deeper understanding of each person, I developed a sense for what they were not saying, leading eventually to being able to “read a room”, fill in the gaps, and help calm nerves.  In some of the very large and critical projects, that saved as much time as it did wear and tear on people’s nervous systems.

Children move from phase to phase as they grow up, which is good because just about the time you were sick and tired of their current behavior, they change and go on to the next one.  Each phase requires something different as a parent, sometimes cracking down, other times cheering on, but you need to always be listening and thinking for new ways to help.  You also learn what’s important and what’s not.  The importance usually involves really permanent, poor choices.  But most bad choices are temporary in nature, just bumps, not cuts.  Let them take their bruises and deal with the consequences.  Dealing with little problems while they’re little teaches them to deal with the bigger ones that surely await. 

The last thing to share is one of my favorite sayings, “No is a complete sentence.”  As a parent, I really don’t have to explain why all the time.  Life is full of choices, but whether you’re going to take out the trash isn’t one of them and I’m not going to argue about it.  When I just say “No” you may not like it, but I’m not going to change my mind or elaborate.  Perhaps giving you the chance to figure out why I said “No” is a good exercise, because life is full of telling yourself “No”. 

There is nobody on Earth that loves and cares more about their children than their parents.  If you think your parents are tough, just wait for life in the real world.  No one wants you to be happier, successful, loved, and safe than your parents.

Did you work while you were in college?

 I had at least one job the entire time I was in college, paid for all my own tuition and books, and took out only $1,200 in student loans.  I lived at home and my parents furnished me with room and board and paid for my car insurance.  Everything else, like a date pizza or a movie, was on me.  Between school and work, I had little time for anything else.

I began college still working at the Sherer’s Ice Cream store on North Main street, which matched the busier summer ice cream season with having that time off from school, allowing me to work a lot of hours and bank money to help out during the school year.  It also allowed me to really focus on school since I had been at Sherer’s for a couple of years and everything was routine.  

About a year into college my friend John Sloan made me aware of a weekend, third-shift computer operator job in the Third National Bank data center where he worked.  It was really appealing to get a job in my field of computer science, and while leaving Sherer’s was sad, I knew it was the right choice.  Their IBM mainframe ran the DOS/VS operating system instead of Wright State’s MFT, and the exposure to a different system was valuable.  There’s not much to do on Saturday and Sunday nights, so I could do some homework or toss a frisbee with the guard.  I did get to run the check sorter and I was amazed how fast the machine could read the MICR codes and the mainframe process them.  

I picked up a second part-time job at Wright State’s administrative computer center as a maintenance programmer and for one quarter I worked both jobs, which along with a full course load, a girlfriend, and almost no sleep between Sunday afternoon and Monday night, was more than I could take.  I decided I had to quit the Fifth National Bank job, but before I could I was fired.  It's a long story, but it taught me how serious banks are, which later in life would seem obvious.  

The student programmer job came with an office and a terminal, two valuable resources.  I could leave my books in my office and take only what I needed to class.  Instead of using the IBM 029 card punch machines, I would type my programs directly into the computer, a huge time saver that was also more accurate, run them ahead of normal student’s jobs and view the output online.  

I spent a year or so fixing existing programs before getting the assignment of writing their first online student admission system.  I developed four 10,000+ line COBOL programs using the IMS DB/DC database and data communication framework, debugged it, and rolled it out.  This was a real-world project, I did it as a student, and it really gave me a lot of confidence.  But my career interests were leaning in a more highly technical direction where “the real action” was happening.  

As a student programmer, I met Jim Nicholas, their Senior Systems Programmer.  Jim hired me as his assistant and I learned from the best.  I did have to cut back my senior year classes to two per quarter, but it was worth extending my degree to get this type of opportunity.  Jim and I worked together at Wright State for a couple of years before he accepted a systems programming job at The Mead Corporation.  I then became the senior guy at the ripe young age of 24.  I hired Steve Silver as my assistance and completed the in-process IBM/SVS to IBM/MVS operating system upgrade.  

I left my Wright State job in June of 1980, just two months shy of completing my undergrad, for a systems programming job at Hobart Corporation in Troy, Ohio, for more money and to leave the political world of academia for the business world.   But I would only be at Hobart for eight months before Jim made me aware of an opening at Mead, which I applied for and accepted, reuniting Jim and me for another twenty-five-year stretch and a lifelong friendship.

Are you good at crafts or building things? What's something you've made and are proud of?

Since I’ve mainly been an I.T. guy, building things is sort of what we do, which I’ll demonstrate in a bit.  But for actual physical objects, there are two that come to mind.  First is a baby blanket I crocheted for my daughter.  No fancy stitching, just the basic one, and I used a multi-colored yarn to make it look interesting.  I spent hours and hours at night looping and pulling yarn and I’m quite proud of the result.  The second thing is the recent basement remodel, replacing almost everything including ceiling tiles, doors, and paneling, replacing the old shag carpeting with vinyl flooring, and applying a fresh coat of paint.  This was by far the biggest home project I’ve ever tackled, I learned a lot, and in the end, it’s a hell of an upgrade.  I also know my limits; I don’t tackle plumbing or major electrical projects.  Basically, anything that can ruin my house if done wrong I leave to the professionals.  But with YouTube videos as a resource, I take on many more tasks than I used to.

I mentioned in response to a previous question that I wrote a new online admission system for Wright State University, and while those were by far the largest programs I’ve created, four other creations contain fond memories.  First, and as part of the admission system effort, I wrote an online screen generator for IBM’s BMS (Basic Mapping Support).  Instead of coding punch cards to describe a screen with field positions, lengths, validations, colors, etc., my program was visual.  The programmer would bring up my blank screen and enter field names and labels where they wanted them to be, then attach the other attributes to them.  Using the card approach, a single change to one field’s length may require dozens of changes to other fields to keep the screen nicely aligned.  With my program that could be done in a few keystrokes.  Nothing like it existed anywhere at the time and IBM came in to take a look at what I had done, interested in possibly buying it.  While that never came about, I was pretty stoked that they had been interested.

Also while working at WSU, I wrote an assembler/VTAM program for the staff that types various input from the university’s departments onto punch cards.  My primary purpose was to learn how VTAM programming worked, but also demonstrate to the staff how we could speed up data input and perform some field validation to avoid much of the input that had to be corrected from being typed incorrectly in the first place.  This was not a really big effort, but the payback came during my interview with The Mead Corporation.  The Manager of Technical Services, Shafter Pierce, asked me if I knew anything about VTAM programming in Assembler, as they needed to add VTAM support to their homegrown Fast Response online system, which only worked with TCAM, a similar but different communications frontend.  I answered, to his dismay, that I did and explained what I had created at WSU.  He probably thought that it was more likely that I was lying to get the job, but the in-depth answer I gave him left him no choice but to acknowledge I really knew how to program that.  In my first year at Mead, I was given the task to add VTAM to Fast Response, which I did, the hardest part was figuring out exactly where in the millions of lines of Fast Response code to add my stuff.  This is one of the biggest examples of something I did just because I wanted to learn something but then turned out to be really valuable in a future project.  Seems to happen to me a lot.

My last programming example is the creation of three digital filing apps for the last two companies I worked for, Catalyst Paper and ND Paper.  Damage Claims, Customer Service, and Accounts Payable all maintained many onsite filing cabinets, and a lot of offsite storage, for the many business documents they used to process orders, payments, and claims, but also needed to be kept for legal records retention requirements, generally seven years.  Damage Claims was the first, and like the others that followed, the need for a digital solution was driven by running out of filing space, which would have caused more office space and filing cabinets to be acquired at considerable expense.  After meeting with them, I quickly determined that everything they received, forms, photos, etc., was already coming in electronically, most through email and their attachments, but also from SAP, their ERP system, websites, and a few others.  I put together a proof-of-concept demo system using Google App Script, which I had never used before, and rewrote it in Microsoft Powershell to make it more maintainable.  After I retired, the Customer Service and Accounts Payable teams received permission to bring me in as a consultant and write similar systems for their needs.  All these efforts resulted in the avoidance of more filing space and in some cases reduced the number of existing cabinets they needed,  These systems also made document sharing easy and one of their favorite features, responding to the constant requests from internal auditors for documents, turned a typical request from a few hours to a few minutes.  But by far the biggest feature, and certainly well-timed, was the ability to work from home as easily as being in the office.  That wasn’t seen as a big benefit, more a nice-to-have, but then the COVID-19 lockdowns required everyone to work at home for over a year.  Without these systems, they say they don’t know how they could have done their jobs.  

Finally, the most boundary-pushing project I took on was for a graduate-level Operations Research class.  We had learned about linear and integer programming and how they could be used to find the absolute best solution to many business problems.  For one class assignment, we had to find a suitable problem, gather data and build an optimizing model.  At that time I was managing the Network Services group at Mead and they were acquiring the Zellerbach distribution business to add to their Mead Merchants business unit.  Zellerbach had 30 offices, including about 5 regional hubs.  My data group’s task was to install networking circuits to all the offices with a second circuit into the hubs to provide redundancy.  We created our parameters including a maximum of four drops per line and a maximum of 50% line utilization, which we based on sales volume compared to the existing Merchants locations.  We turned over our requirements to AT&T to design the most cost-effective solution, but then I realized that maybe I could use this for my college project.  After a week of contemplation, I figured this would make a great project.  I had to write two PL/1 programs to generate every combination of cities that fit the restrictions, which generated a 30-row, 20,000+-column integer program for our mainframe-based linear programming software.  I used distances between cities from our mainframe MileMaker software as a substitute for line cost.  The model was configured to find the shortest total distance that met all the requirements.   I submitted it to run at night and woke up the next morning with it still executing.  I figured out at the program was spending most of its time swapping pages of memory to and from disk, a result of this being a huge matrix to solve.  But as a systems programmer, I knew how to keep the swap dataset in memory, made that change, and submitted it again, and saw that it fixed the problem.  It took several iterations to get a final network solution, and some of those tries demonstrated how close I was to bumping up against the maximum model I could solve.  I turned my solution over to AT&T to price and compare it against their world-class INOS network design tool’s solution.  My design beat theirs by $100 per month.  Not a lot, but a win!  I packaged up all the documentation for the assignment, about an inch thick, and submitted it as required at the final exam.  The professor was looking at the various assignments turned in while we took the exam, usually spending 30 seconds to a minute on them.  When he came to mine, he read for 5 minutes, got up from behind his desk, walked around the room, still reading, and walked out the door down the hallway, returning several minutes later.  I figured he was impressed and I would get a good grade, which I did, an A+.  

What is the best job you've ever had? What made it such a good experience?

In the early 1990s, I was promoted to Mead Corporation’s Manager of Network Services, part of an organizational realignment as personal computers had become a predominant technology.  I had global responsibility for the corporation’s voice and data networks and quite a large budget.  There were about a dozen people on the team and we were living through some of the biggest technology changes ever including the Internet, local-area-networks, and mobile phones.  In addition to all the new stuff, we had to maintain the legacy technologies including coax-connected mainframes, multi-point AT&T wide-area networks, and voicemail systems.  While there was a lot of new technology to absorb, I enjoyed the bigger challenges of getting the group to embrace new ways to approach their work.   A few examples, really smaller in scale, demonstrate the type of challenges that made this my all-time favorite job.

Our CIO gave us the assignment of correcting, and then owning, the company’s pocket phone directory which had been published very poorly by the previous ownership group.  We quickly figured out where the disconnects were and republished the directory, but for the next year’s version, I was determined to fix a lot of other issues with it.  I was very insistent that we would publish the best directory ever and the team changed almost everything about it.  Instead of printing it on glossy paper, they used a matte that was easy to write on without smearing.  Instead of a hard, glued binder, they made it spiral-bound, making it easy to lie flat.  Instead of portrait orientation, they made it landscape, much easier to fit names, titles, and phone numbers on a single line.  Those were three of the bigger changes, but there were many others.  When it came time to publish, I insisted, several times, to get the entire Network Services team together for a couple of hours, eat some pizza, and try to find errors.  The first error was found on the first page, a mistake on one of our Board of Directors, shocking the project lead.  After two hours we had made it through only half of the directory, found at least one hundred errors, and had to schedule another two hours to complete the review.  I knew that our group because we interacted with so many people in so many locations, had a more broad knowledge of the organization than anyone, and would find lots of mistakes.  It was a great team-building exercise on top of putting out the best-ever directory.  

Another voice team story occurred during a PBX replacement project.  Since the last replacement, we had built up a large closet full of handsets, mostly those that did not have a display on them or were unique in one fashion or another.  I was determined not to have that happen on my watch.  I told the group that we would only offer two phones, both being beige and having a display, the only difference was a larger one for inside sales, administrative assistants, or others that needed lots of buttons.  They thought I was crazy, that I didn’t understand that the executives had a lot of preferences, and having only two selections was going to bring their wrath down on them.  But after we held an open house so everyone could see the phones and make their selection, they found that no one cared.  Everyone was fine with only two choices, even the executives.  They really had more important things to do.

As part of Corporate Information Resources embracing the challenges of the PC/LAN future, somebody would have to pick up responsibility for shared printers, and with every other manager clearly not wanting it and its history of problems, I volunteered Network Services.  I figured this would be a fun challenge and our group had the distinct advantage of being able to monitor and capture all the data flying back and forth to the printers, giving us plenty of information to get to the root cause of most problems and implement fixes.  We quickly upped the amount of RAM on the printers based on our insights, and that resolved the largest number of issues.  But we also tackled the human side, the biggest one being that nobody could walk up to a printer and know how to print to it.  So for every printer, we attached a clear plastic pouch to its front, then inserted a printed label that contained the printer name, model, and other information the typical end-user would need to know.  Sometimes just listening and doing the simple things based on those insights makes people trust you.  And that goes a long way.

There are so many other stories, trips to IBM’s networking center in Raleigh to tackle some big network design challenges and trips to Europe to install networks that involved long and intense days to accomplish.  We endured several extra-long return trips to the U.S., heading to California or Utah for a conference or meeting, making for some very long and tiring days.

Lots of work, loads of fun.  Funny how those go together.