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Tommy The Geek Improves Processes |
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Tommy the Geek improves processes.
Tommy once worked at Unitech in Austin Texas. He worked as a production test technician, repairing computer boards. Someone had written a test program which he used to test the boards and generate test signals for troubleshooting. He would enter a test name at the command prompt which would initiate the test and wait. Tommy found this tedious, so he read the manuals and taught my self assembly language. He revised the program so It would read a macro to guide it through multiple tests. In this way it was able to test the boards over night. He could repair other things while the tests were running. Tommy hired on at Barret Trucking as a production test technician. They were building warehouse robotic forklifts. They had a Intel in-circuit tester to test their boards. A predecessor had written some firmware to do their board testing but failed to provide documentation. The tests could test only one board at a time in a limited way. Once again he read the manuals. He wrote software utilizing the testers macro language to more fully test the boards. He also adapted the software to incorporate testing the changes that engineering made. In the navy, Tommy lived in Japan. Casio created one of the first hand held computers that ran Basic as its operating system. Tommy bought one and wrote a word processor in Basic so he could use the machine to write letters home and for college work. Later on Tommy purchased a Radio Shack 4p and revised his word processor to run on this machine. At San Diego State University, Tommy was hired on to be a technician in the Geology department. Tommy did the usual electronics work, but a major part of his time he spent building a computer lab. He wrote a menu based system that would launch the software the geologists used to analyze rocks and geologic formations. In this way he allowed them to more easily get the geology done without having to struggle with MS-DOS or Novell. At the University of Texas Tommy was an applications programmer. Tommy wrote software to translate old geophysical data to new formats so that new software could read it. Tommy wrote a graphical ship guidance system that utilized the new global positioning technology that was coming online at the time. It was at UT that Tommy started doing more system administration. Tommy wrote scripts to monitor disk usage, queue print jobs, and monitor email. He installed new computers, and troubleshot hardware problems. He went to sea twice to support research projects. On these trips he built computer networks and monitored data collection. Advance Micro Devices hired Tommy to do system administration. He solved hardware problems. Tommy upgraded the operating systems. He ordered new hardware. He developed a system to display factory process data graphically. To do this he wrote scripts to pull the data from Oracle and graph it with an arcane graphing package which could display the graphs on X-windows graphical devices.
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