Get to Know Me

Hi – thank you for being here. I’m happy to meet you! I’m a Hillsboro High School and MIT Sloan School graduate, a software engineer, a singer/guitarist/songwriter, and wilderness hike leader. I’ve been on the Banks School District Budget Committee since 2012, and am the current chairman. I live three miles up a gravel road at 1,300′. That’s my driveway and well house in the photo under my profile pic.

I’m an Army brat. My mother’s paternal grandparents arrived in Oregon from Wisconsin in 1880. Her other grandparents came by train from Kansas in August 1920. My father came here in Fall 1955 for college from Hawai’i. I’m here to listen to you and work with you to get us where we want to go from where we are today.

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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 Park). 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: ARMY BRAT
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 served two enlistments. He had two tours in Vietnam during his second enlistment. Between enlistments, 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. John’s 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.

Me, Computers, and AI

OREGON RETURN
I moved back to Washington County from Boston in late 1997 to be closer to family. My career in Boston continued here with business process re-engineering and improvement 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.

TECH POSTSCRIPT
This site is templated from HeyVictor via ActBlue. Although the code isn’t exactly what I’d have written, it’s good enough for the purpose at hand.  I didn’t write a single line of it. Yay! However, I took all the photos (except my portrait) and wrote every word of text.