[geeks] How old am I and where do I come from...

[William Barnett-Lewis]

Oh why not? I make an idiot of myself here regularly enough.

William Barnett-Lewis, born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin on Sept 30, 1963.
Got started with my best friends trash-80 (1st model w/4k ram and the
cassette tape was an upgrade) and then played with apple II's in high
school while trying to write semi-subversivly for the school paper.
Graduated in '82, have never gone back into the building and god willing
never will. 

Did 3 years active duty in the Army as a M-60 tanker stationed in
Germany and Ft Riley KS. Germany was wonderful, Kansas was hell and why
I got out of the Army. 

Got out and tried to go to college. Also tried to go to tech school for
electronics. Ran out of money both times. Ended up with an IBM XT (full
640k and a 20mb full height MFM boat anchor) and a copy of Minix and
learned just enough to be dangerous. Had an Amiga 500 with a 40mb SCSI
drive in there too. My ex-girlfriend of 7 years in there is still using
that A500 as her primary machine. 

Eventually ended up back in my hometown where I almost went bankrupt
trying to do consulting, though I did some interesting work replacing
PC's with SCO and getting an Interactive System running on a 486 with
wyse terminals for my National Guard unit. Moved to the state capitol of
Madison in 1993 and got a job as the IT section for the State Elections
Board. Had a DG Aviion based system running DG/UX pushing Word Perfect
and a custom Ingres db on NCD Xterms. That was nice. Couple of years
later the idiots in the state government decided they'd save money if
everyone was "standardized". Well we got NT workstations and told to
port the Ingres db to Oracle (a Standard you see). Our contractor for
that failed because we didn't pay enough attention to the trouble they
got into. So I'm still running that 12 year old DG box and the same
database because it's mission critical. 

Earlier this year, because even centrally administered NT's TCO sucks a
box of rocks through a juice box straw, they transitioned us to Citrix
based Windows Terminals (NCD again, though the irony is lost on most of
them) On the plus side it's wonderful work and most of my users are good
folk. Now if I could just keep them from using Access for things that
require a real database... ;'p Only rarely do I program anymore, mostly
sysadm/dbadmin/help desk as the official one is referred to as the
"helpless desk".

I have been married since New Years Eve 1994 and this spring we spent a
total of 5 weeks over two trips in Vietnam adopting our son John Lac
Lewis (born Jan 9, 2002). If I ever get a digital cam or scanner I'll
have a gazillion proud parent photos to post.
He's been the 1) most exhausting thing in my life and 2) most wonderful
thing in my life. I'd never want to be without him but I would love to
sleep through the night again. 

Mostly I like collecting workstations. I have mac. sun, hp, vaxstation,
and most recently alpha in my office. Eventually my goal is to have one
of each type of Vaxstation and at least representatives from all other
workstion families. 

For relaxation in the fall I enjoy going bird hunting (upland birds) and
shooting my flintlock rifle and .22 Colt Woodsman pistol. I need to get
out to the shooting club and shoot trap again. I allegedly deer hunt,
but that's more of an excuse for a nice walk in the woods anymore than
anything else. OTOH, if Bambi sticks his nose up in front of me, I have
no objection to his going into my freezer. 

We also like visiting historical sites wherever we are. 

Well, that's more than enough blather. 

William
-- 
You better watch out   What you wish for;
It better be worth it  So much to die for.
		       Courtney Love