I enlisted in the U.S. Air Force 1973 when I was 17 years old as a Security Specialist and Patrol Dog handler. After my first 4-year enlistment I cross-trained to Law Enforcement and retired in 1994 as a Master Sergeant (MSgt, E7) after 20 years. I retired at Keesler AFB, Mississippi and completed my BS in Computer Science at the world famous University of Southern Mississippi in the equally famous metropolis of Long Beach, Mississippi. I worked for a local marine telephone company for a couple years as a Software Engineer/Database Administrator (DBA) before I moved to central Floriduh to take a job with a warehouse management software company.
The duration of my jobs ranged from 10 days to seven years, with most being about two years. I coded mostly in SQL, with C, C++, C#, Pascal, Basic, and Visual Basic for the GUI and business layers. I did a lot of military contract projects, a few for the Army at the National Training Center (NTC) at Ft. Irwin, Ca, and at the live-fire tank range in Grafenwoehr Germany. I also did projects for the Marines and Navy, but curiously, never the USAF. I found that the military contracting world is filled with incompetent companies that overpromise, overcharge and/or rip the government off. There are also good companies, but there is always pressure to promise the world to get the contract, only to tell the project manger later all the reasons they can’t have what they were promised, or at least that it will cost them more.
My last job was with the largest mall owner in the world where I was the Database Development Manager for the Digital Marketing Group. I got to work from home for seven years before I retired. In that entire time I probably spent twenty days in total at corporate or on trips, so my daily commute was about 30 seconds. In that position I learned to make absolutely sure your phone is muted before you scream about how stupid someone else on the call is. Better yet, bite your tongue and tell the dogs all about it when the call is over.
I tried the independent remote route for bit after retirement, but I found that you were always up against people offshore that were billing at insanely low rates, or projects that were advertised at almost nothing. One project that I remember to this day was for a code review of 650,000 lines of PHP in 30 days for $100. A project of that scope could easily run into many months depending on the quality of the code and the documentation available, but there were people actually bidding on it.
I shot Bowling Pins, USPSA (IPSC when I started), and SCSA competitively for many years, but I’ve gotten too old, fat, and slow to do it anymore. I shot mostly .45 ACP and .38 Super, but some .357 Magnum, .223, .308, 12 gauge, and .22 rimfire. I loaded all my own pistol and rifle ammo with the exception of the .22.
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I retired-retired in 2018 and these days I play with computers, play tournament NLHE poker, and annoy my wife and dogs.
