Mike’s Short Resume

Education: Preparatory: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York Education: B.S. in EE – 1968; M.S. in EE – 1970; Ph.D. in EE – 1972 Subsequent: Various short courses and self study

• Most Recently I took two Ruby on Rails courses:
  • Owning Rails – from Marc-André Cournoyer. It’s a great course if you are into Rails 3 and want to really learn your way around. In fact, I think it’s the only thing other than the community doc which is useful – except for
  • Prag Studio’s Rails 2 – from Mike Clark and Chad Fowler. That’s a really intense 4 days and worth every penny. I can’t say enough about the course and these guys, so I won’t even try.
• Game of Logging – basically how to drop big trees with a chain saw w/o getting killed. Don’t use a saw w/o taking this course.
• master course in joke writing – from Gene Perret – wonderful experience
• working livestock and marketing with Bud Williams – an amazing man. All of his livestock handling techniques are rooted in real life and have application far beyond simply handling cattle safely, sanely, and gently.
• participated in the early stages of the Rich Dad Franchise program – I learned more about business, sales, and many other things in about six months with these guys than are possible to learn in any business program. I’m very grateful for the opportunity and kindness shown me by Robert Kiyosaki and Blair Singer.
• continuous self study of programming languages via books and reading open source code. I’ve been learning by reading code since about 1986 or so – starting with comp.sources.unix on the old news feeds. I consider this to be the best source of educational material on the art of programming available. Open source is critical to technical education – and our technically educated people are the infrastructure of modern society.
• and . . . oh, lots of stuff – digital photography, script writing, 2-d animation, video editing (yes, I have FCP and can kind of use it). But you get the idea: I’m always studying something.

Current Occupation: Self employed and between businesses Experience: Things I’m doing now:

• Rails Stuff – have spent the last year and a half mostly hacking Rails 3. Building sites and then junking them. I created and maintain 4 tiny Ruby gems for Rails and have made a couple of contributions.
• Digital Visual Art – http://mikehowardimages.com
• Soul Searching – after much soul searching, I’ve worked it out that I’m mainly qualified for back end programming.  Front end stuff involving browser insanity drives me nuts – which is not a pretty sight.

Things I’ve done, but won’t do any more:

• Custom Programming – around 1994 through about 2005 – take a look at the “old Stuff” for samples. I’d left our investment business and decided to make a living as a “computer consultant”. We’re still alive, so it worked.
• Set up ran and disposed of a dairy farm in Upstate NY – 2000 through 2006. That includes researching and designing how to do it. What a disaster!!!!! Everybody lies in the dairy business. It’s awful. But as one wise ex-dairy farmer said: “it’s easy to get into dairy, the hard part is getting out”. Far too true.
• small scale *NIX systems administration – it’s just too hard and w/o rewards
• Assistant Professor of Computer Science at SUNY, New Paltz, NY – 5 years (last year 1/2 time)
• Inertial Navigation Analyst – Sperry Systems Management (now defunct) and Rockwell Collins
• Dairy Framing – now that’s really too hard and you have to have at least one side job to make ends meet
• ex-Partner / Founder of Miller / Howard Investments – a money management firm. (left about 1994 to pursue other interests)
• attempted to raise 4 to 5 kids – depending on how you want to count it.

Personal Data: Married – coming up on 30 years. Age – old enough to know better, but not always smart enough to do it

Advertisement