Education:

• Columbia University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Biological Sciences, Ph.D. program. Left after completion of 5 terms.
• B.S. with High Honors and Highest Distinction from University of Maine in Zoology

Highlights of Recent Experience:

• Publisher – Sr. Manager of Development in Technology
  • Built from specification a brand new site in the portfolio of sites
  • Composite of technologies to create a Web 2.0 style social networking site
  • UI in JSP with JSON, DWR, and Custom AJAX interactions with a bulk of the user interaction in
    in Flex 2.0
  • Back end technology in primarily Spring and Hibernate with Oracle database
  • Media processing in PERL handing off to a JMS & Java based workflow engine that used various SOA techniques to convert video, audio and images to site standards
  • Built out several key clusters for the media processing subsystem in Solaris, Linux & Windows OSes
• Private Bank – Vice President – Enterprise Architect
  • Architected and implemented a redesign of the asset management account opening process –
    the first in 20 years. Highlights included: first portal type system, first IMS updated
    from J2EE, and first project to use RUP.
  • Received 2 (personal and team) Excellence in Service awards for my work with account
    opening.
• Airline B2B – Team Lead Portal & Web Development
  • Migrated and implemented existing website into a content management system based upon ColdFusion, and JSP’s and EJB’s in WebLogic
  • Developed application architecture to facilitate rapid implementation of business processes and
    for integration with airline’s and supplier’s existing systems using
    • Web services – XML, WSDL, Axis, ColdFusion MX, WebLogic
    • EJB’s – entity beans (CMP and BMP) data model, session beans with business logic on WebLogic and JBoss
    • ColdFusion MX and Struts based MVC system for page flow and front end rendering
• Online Retailer – Senior Application Developer
  • Programmed in-memory structure for product information, which is very fast and efficient, added
    in appropriate caching algorithms. System handles tens of thousands of products and over 400
    servers
    • Hierarchical catalogue item retrieval – no acceptable point of failure
    • Preload of high demand items into cache on server startup
    • Meet the demands of 10’s of thousands of transactions a minute
  • Continually tested and reviewed new code as well as existing code to create the robustness and
    scalability requires to handle over 60,000 orders and multi-million product information requests
    daily

Thank you Frederick Douglass for reminding me of this from the grave, as tiled into the side of a work center near the Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC. I walked past this building about a week ago and have been rolling around this phrase in my head since.

Then this morning I listened to a report on NPR about the new Arabic School here in NYC. There is lots and lots of controversy around this school. You can read all about it, if you care, but I spare you the jingoism and xenophobia: people hate the school.

At this point you might be thinking what do the words of a freed slave have to do with an Arabic school in NYC…

It is simple, and 2 fold:

1. If we learn about “the enemy” and increase understanding of “him” we can no longer vilify “him” and the GWOT will have to be questioned, thereby upsetting the fascist US status quo.
2. People are idiots and inherently hate education - just watch any Fox network and you will see why they are so popular. Idiots rule this nation by their gullibility and the ease by which they can be manipulated.

I am squarely behind this school. If it spawns a couple kids to civil disobedience and question our jihad against anything non-evangelically-Christian, then there might just be a God.

I never talk about work, notice that there is not a single post on here about my job. It isn’t because I hate my job. In fact I love it! I have read far too many stories about people who vent about a boss, mine is pretty good, nothing to vent, or accidentally give away a trade secret, or you name it. I plan on that never happening to me! So here goes my first blog post about work.

I suffered through 2 days of the worst training in my 34 years of education. The purpose was to be enlightened by a search engine expert.

I learned 4 things:

1. why my dad cannot find anything useful in Google
2. why I have to go to page 2 to find what I want in Google
3. why the 3rd page is always in Japanese
4. all web sites should look like Edmunds.com

Beyond the sexists and culturally irrelevant stories about cars and hairspray, we listened to a total of about 2 hours of ranting against WikiPedia’s ranking in the top 5 of almost every search. It was obvious this man has a white whale and his name is Wiki.

My take on this: he hates it because he cant game it and he cant game it because it is actually useful information on a topic.

This will ALWAYS be one of the fundamental pricipals of subject expert directories versus automated link collectors: humans are better information aggregators, synthesizers and judges of the final product. Sorry Google, I love you. But I know where to look when I want information versus when I want to buy a desktop fan.

Oh yeah and when branding yourself, there is a point of obvious, then annoying, then tacky, and somewhere you end up at classless.

HAHAHAHA - Do a little dance, we were right:

After offering a bleak assessment of the Bush administration’s strategy in Iraq, Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, said today that he was urging lawmakers and President Bush to change course quickly to protect a further erosion of America’s standing in the world.

It was only a matter of time before the cripple wounded made this just like Viet Nam. Thank you modern medicine, because of you Americas mistakes are even more numerous and walking into our grocery stores, churches, and right in the faces of the people who supported this boondoggle.

Now if we can only feel the backlash in middle America. If only. Who dares to call themselves a neo-con now? Creative destruction anyone? What a freakin’ mess.

All done on Jesus’ watch too. Thank you religious zealots in Alabama. Thank you for this chance to once again prove intellegence and education will win out over you backwards ways. What was that about “them uppity northerns bettah stop comings downs here ands treatins us like some kind of anthramapology experiment?” What way my reply? “Stop acting like protohumans and there will be nothing to study!”

I guess that “I’d rather have a beer with Bush” sentiment now includes a beer with Bush and an artificial leg and PTSD.

And before you think I am not sympathetic to people who are hurt in war, this is not personal, this is politics. I feel really badly for these people, they were consumed by a machine that doesn’t give a fuck about them and to make it more onerous (entailing obligations that exceed advantages) the machine duped them into thinking this was their patriotic duty.

Those of you who have been subjected to my ramblings for a while will recall that I was obsessed with the legitimacy of statehood.

As if by magic, I came across an entry on slashdot about Pirate Bay moving to Sealand - an abandoned UK fort turned principality. It seems the debate over whether or not Sealand is really an independent state still rages. Those who oppose point out:

• Has space or territory which has internationally recognized boundaries (boundary disputes are OK).
• Has people who live there on an ongoing basis.
• Has economic activity and an organized economy. A country regulates foreign and domestic trade and issues money.
• Has the power of social engineering, such as education.
• Has a transportation system for moving goods and people.
• Has a government which provides public services and police power.
• Has sovereignty. No other State should have power over the country’s territory.
• Has external recognition. A country has been “voted into the club” by other countries.

And a quick check of Wikipedia reveals even more on the subject:

In international law, the two most common schools of thought for the creation of statehood are the constitutive and declarative theories. The constitutive theory was the standard 19th-century model of statehood, and the declaratory theory was developed in the 20th century to address shortcomings of the constitutive theory. In the constitutive theory, a state exists exclusively via recognition by other states. The theory splits on whether this recognition requires “diplomatic recognition” or merely “recognition of existence”.

A raging question which was on the whiteboard in my head now has an answer.

Yes! Please do. Why? Because only if we let them make this country the worst place to live in the world will their corrupt idiotic ideology be exposed for what it truly is.

• It simple isn’t enough that people are doubting the war. Why should they? Is isn’t like we were lied to.
• It isn’t enough the poster boy for rah-rah America was killed by his own butt-buddies marines.
• People are up in arms about a sniper video on CNN, well, war sucks, and it sucks to have your Wal*Mart trip interrupted by war. Oh wait, we are at war, did you forget?
• You get what you asked for. You want a nation full of hate? You voted away your jobs? You voted for war? Good, thank you, now cry at your sons’ graves and vote again. Vote! Vote! Until all your kids are dead.
• Even your own people are wondering: “Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them.” Hmm. It goes on and on.
• Listen to Lou Dobbs, he makes some good points.

I don’t need to go much more into this. It is real. And I love it! I love saying “I told you so!” Please, please, please keep the status quo, because it will be cool to see just how bad this can get. I want every one of you to have low paying jobs, no healthcare, dead children, mountains of debt, no education, and then maybe only then, will you realize you sold your soul, you sold your country to warmongers who helped bring Asian sweatshop living standards to the heartland.