Get to Know Me

MY OREGON TRAIL

I’m an Army brat: my father was on active duty during most of my childhood. My mother was born in Vancouver, Washington. Her paternal grandparents arrived in Oregon from Wisconsin in 1880. Her other grandparents came by train from Kansas in August 1920. My father came to Portland in Fall 1955 from Hawai’i to go to Reed College.

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Fun and Games     My 1994 Toyota Corolla    Spirituality and Religion   Hair Proud

FAMILY TO OREGON
My great-granduncle, Simon Benson, was an early 1900s Oregon timber and philanthropist (Benson Bubblers, Benson Polytechnic High School, Benson State Recreation Area). He arrived from Wisconsin in 1880 with his wife, Esther Searle, and my mother’s paternal grandparents, David and Lorett Searle Drew. The women were sisters.  They took a train to San Francisco and a coach to Portland, since no transcontinental trains came to Portland until September 1883. The Searles’ mother, Jane, followed them the next year. She arrived on July 3, 1881 to help with Simon’s & Esther’s children, because Esther caught tuberculosis. My mother’s father was born in Chehalis in 1893.

My mother’s mother, Esther Robb, and Esther’s parents, John and Anna Schneider Robb, took a train to get here from Kansas in August 1920. My father grew up in Hawai’i, where his Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, and German ancestors worked on sugar plantations. His Native Hawai’ian great-grandmother’s family had taro fields near a sugar plantation. Dad came to Oregon in 1955 to attend Reed College. My parents met at a folk dance at Reed on May Day, 1957.

Genealogy

EARLY YEARS:  TEXAS -> OREGON -> OKLAHOMA -> TEXAS -> OKLAHOMA
As a child during World War II, Dad grew up wanting to be in the military. He left Reed in 1957 to join the Army. Born and baptized Roman Catholic as a legacy of my Portuguese heritage at Ft. Bliss, Texas, I spent most of my childhood in Lawton, Oklahoma and El Paso, Texas while he was on active duty twice. He had two tours in Vietnam during his second active duty. Between active duty terms, we lived on First Street in Beaverton for a few years, across from where the post office was built while I played with my Tonka trucks. The cross streets were not paved. My earliest dateable memory is from the 1962 Columbus Day storm – an extra-tropical, Category 3 strength storm that flattened many a barn and TV tower in western Oregon. I was almost four years old. I remember how cool it was to have candles at the dinner table, and having Dad  home from his job at Tektronix for a few days.

HIGH SCHOOL: HILLSBORO, OREGON
After Dad was RIF’d (Reduction in Force, laid off) in 1973, we came back to Oregon where I attended Hillsboro High, graduating in 1976. At the time, it was the only high school in town. Hillsboro had about as many people as St. Helens does now. It was often called “Hicksboro” by kids from other schools. I picked strawberries in the summer for $1/flat. What are now Intel’s Hawthorne and Jones Farms campuses were still farms, and I remember riding my bike past the orchards on Cornell Road. We lived on Spruce Street in Hillsboro, and there was just a wheat field between our house and Hale’s Restaurant on TV Highway. Hale’s is still there. The Sunset Esplanade Mall is in the former wheat field.

COLLEGE: CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
I went to MIT and lived in the Boston area for 20 years, getting my degree in Management. It of course meant finance, accounting, micro- and macroeconomics, marketing, and operations. MIT being MIT, my concentration was in  building computer simulation models, systems of nonlinear differential equations solved in time series – for policy analysis and business process improvement, in a field called System Dynamics. I became very aware that systems are linear, until they’re not.  Also MIT being MIT, my degree is a science degree, so I took three semesters of calculus, two semesters of physics, and semesters of astronomy, geology, control theory… you get the idea. On the other hand, my minor was writing short stories.

My management concentration – building simulation models for policy analysis – wasn’t (and isn’t) a field with a lot of job opportunities. So my first serious job was as a business manager. My employer, Lincoln & Company, was a 25-person engineering company that designed controller boards for laser printers. I worked there for two years. Their biggest success was designing the controller for a popular Digital Equipment Corporation laser printer in the mid-1980s, the LN03. They laid off most of their staff, and I went to work for their accountant doing taxes and financial work for real estate companies and commercial architecture firms. Then I started selling accounting software, then writing software for business process improvement… Life is what happens while we’re busy making plans.

A Lifetime of Programming

OREGON RETURN
I moved back to Washington County from Boston in late 1997 to be closer to family. My work with business process re-engineering and improvement continued here with in-house applications at Intel, Nike, PGE, FEI, Vestas, and some other corporations that weren’t as large or even here in the early 1970s. I am what we call in the trade a full stack engineer: designing databases, user interfaces, and the middleware to connect them. The applications facilitate cooperation, coordination, and collaboration among diverse and dispersed people.

AGILE PROCESS
The Agile software development process I used for many years starts with talking to all the stakeholders and understanding the presenting problem and its underlying issues, giving everyone a chance to make sure they are heard. Next we prioritize the issues, estimate the level of effort to address each aspect. and re-prioritize accordingly. We typically have daily team meetings, weekly stakeholder meetings, and continuous online updates. I’d like to apply this process to developing legislation to help you.

I do have fun, but that’s a story for a different page .