GTKY: ATNO/TW

I decided to make it two victims per week. What can I say? Too little time. Too many people. You do the math.

Feel free to add your questions for the victim. Mine are standardized. Your's can be personalized.


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According to his profile, this victim hails from the city where I was born. He's one of the people who keeps OZZU's threads neat and tidy. He also helps keep them informative.




Let's get to know ATNO/TW!!!


1. Tell us about your employment situation or area of study in school.

2. Tell us about your education (formal or otherwise).

3. What's your favorite meal or restaurant?

4. Age (if you dare or care to answer)?

5. What, if any, are your plans for your future?

6. Tell us about where you live.

7. What/When/How/Why did you become a webmaster, or why do you want to become a webmaster?

8. Tell us about your first kiss.

9. Tell us about your best quality (real or imagined).

10. Who is your hero?




Please take your time, you've got a whole week to answer.

Wow -- I almost missed this! So I'm in the hot seat this week? OK -- I'll give it some thought and try to put together the answers when I get home from work this evening.

1. Tell us about your employment situation or area of study in school.

Currently, I'm employed as an "IT Rep" for a local nuclear services company. "What's an IT Rep?", you ask. *shrug - beats the crap out of me. In actuality, I'm the network admin (it's a newly created postition and I don't think anyone knew enough to give me the correct title *lol). Unfortunately, they chose to establish a Novell network a couple years ago, and although I like Novell (to a degree) it's a bit on the difficult side to manage, and that is compounded by some specific server problems that have caused me nothing but grief since I started. We recently purchased a Windows 2003 server for our company website and I have the responsibility to develop that. I did a quick redo of the original site, but will develop that shortly into a contemporary professional design. The new server also gives us the advantage of adding streaming video for some of our clients to observe some testing that is conducted in our motor repair shop. We're about 2 weeks away from the rollout test on that. In addition, we are currently installing a wireless network to add the external buildings into the infrastructure and allow clients the ability to access the network via their laptops. It's a huge step for me in the IT world, as prior to this I was in retail management for close to 17 years (primarily with Circuit City) at various locations, states and cities throughout the U.S. In addition, I will also be developing internal applications for the company. Primarily what I like about my new job is that it is 8-5 Monday through Friday. I actually have a life outside of work for the first time in my life.

2. Tell us about your education (formal or otherwise).

I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Communication from a Pennsylvania University. I like to say I have a "BS in communications" (It sounds more appropriate *grin). I also speant 8 months of last year in an Advanced Microcomputer Lan Support Specialist Program at a local Tech school. I was extremely dissapointed. I got down to the last test on the last day of class, and there were just too many acronymns I hadn't memorized. I ended up with a B on that test, which brought my perfect 4.0 down to a 3.95! The class was a crash course on virtually all Windows OSs from DOS 6.22 all the way through Win2K (We skipped XP since it's relatively close to Win2K). We also studied the OSI model, Novell Netware 5.0 server and Clients, Windows NT 4, and Windows 2000 Server as well as LAN and WAN protocols and configurations. Very intense.

3. What's your favorite meal or restaurant?

My favorite meal is my own chile recipe which I've been working on since I lived in Texas over ten years ago. It is almost always made with fresh vegetables from my garden and several "secret" ingredients. My favorite restaurant? Picolo Mondo's in Riverside, California. Of course, the last time that I was there was in 1984. I don't know if it still exists, but I remember it was a small mom and pop Italian joint in a small plaza off of Magnolia Blvd. They had a quaint old world atmosphere and at the time they only had that restaurant and the "parent" one in NYC. What I liked most was the lasagna. A humorous story re: that restaurant. The first time I went I took a book to read. I used to do that, because at the time I was alone, and reading was something to do while eating. I had to call back the next morning and ask the management if anyone had found the book that I had inadvertantly left on the table. They had. The manager told me, "That's a hell of a book to forget". The title - "Use your Perfect Memory"!!!!

4. Age (if you dare or care to answer)?

44 years, 5 months, 15 days, 3 hours, 1 minute

5. What, if any, are your plans for your future?

I believe it was Lou Holtz (former Notre Dame coach) who had roughly 105 goals for his life and achieved them all. I don't have that many! *lol. But I do have a few. Number one is NEVER to work in retail again! I do have every intention of staying with my present employer for quite some time and just continue to learn. Some people are "professional students" so-to-speak. I am sorta, too. I just did it different. I've always learned on the job, where people pay me vs. learning at a school where I pay them (at least almost always).

6. Tell us about where you live.

Now? Pittsburgh. When I was born? Pittsburgh. Actually, slightly north of Pittsburgh right outside of Beaver Falls, PA, which some of you oldtimer sports fans might remember as being Joe Nameth town. In fact - growing up, I lived 3 blocks away form Joe's parents. After college, I left PA and headed south and lived in Norfolk VA, Phoenix AZ, Anaheim and Riverside CA, Ft. Lauderdale FL, Asheville NC, Dallas TX, Houston TX, San Antonio TX, McAllen TX, 3 days in Kansas City MO, Dallas TX (a second time), and then back home to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is best known as "The Steel City". The bridges across the three rivers (Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio) reflect that legacy. It is a beautiful city and has on a few occasions been in the top ten places to live in the US. Once a steel mill town it is now more of a blue chip and service town. Finally, it is starting to really catch up to modern times. Forgive the about.com popups, but here's a link to some pictures, etc. of my home area:
http://pittsburgh.about.com/library/blphotogallery.htm

7. What/When/How/Why did you become a webmaster, or why do you want to become a webmaster?

Bought a computer around 1996. I was afraid to turn in on. I knew zero, zip, nada. I was afraid that if I turned it on, I'd break it. The irony is that I had been a sales manager for the computer department at Circuit City for almost 2 years (That should teach you something about salesmen! *lol). It was just a chain of events really...one thing led to another, and eventually I found myself learning more and more code, and becoming more and more interested. The key was when a former employee looked me up because he heard I was doing webpages/sites for fun and he wanted one. I did his site -- he loved it, and essentially was the key for my other clients via his recommendations. I've often thought about actually starting my own company, but put it on the back burner, because I really feel I need to learn more, and am not extremely comfortable with my creativity level.

8. Tell us about your first kiss.

I don't kiss and tell. OK -- you twisted my arm. Her name was Stephanie. It was 1975 after a school Christmas Dance (I didn't know how to dance - I just wanted to ask her out!). I was wearing a light blue liesure suit (I hope some of you know what that is), and she was in a nice white evening gown. A bunch of us went to a friends house for the "after" party and next thing I knew we were all in his basement and everybody was making out. I had no clue what I was doing, but I wanted to kiss her, and next thing I know her tongue was in my mouth and I'm like, YECH! 'nuf said. Oddly, that was the only date I had with her. 8 months later I was dating her best friend and really wanted to marry her. It didn't work out. Go to college. Similar scenario. Dated a wonderful woman for about 2 weeks until I licked her nose one night. She didn't like it much. She actually broke up with me because of that (well she did tell me not to do it! *grins). A few weeks later I was dating her best friend and ended up marrying her. We have a beautiful daughter, because of that, who's almost 18 right now. (hmmm..should probably mention that I am now divorced, but the mariage did last almost 10 years -- better than most now-a-days I guess *sighs)

9. Tell us about your best quality (real or imagined).

I love people. Plain and simple. And I love helping people. I'm not like Mr. Gates where I can spend whatever I want to on people to help them. I just give what I can. Makes me feel like I have a purpose.

10. Who is your hero?

My dad. He died from the effects of Parkinson's disease last year on December 30th. In spite of the disease, he never did anything but give of himself to help others until he took his last breath. That's what I want to be like.

Well, that's almost a book, but you asked for it -- you got it!

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Edit added:

I wanted to add this based on my answer to question 10 re: my hero.

I have one computer that does nothing but protein folding research. What is that? Well...anyone hear of distributed computing? This link to Stanford's research will pretty much explain it:
http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/

There are other similar distributed computing projects out there, but as you can see, the one I chose does have the potential to help people with Parkinson's disease, Altzheimers and others. If you've never heard of or looked into this it is so worthwhile...

I found Lou for ya! He's down here in South Carolina coaching at the U of SC. Unfortunately, he's not achieving many goals.


hahahahaahaha

I knew you lived in SC. You're probably only a few hours from my daughter and ex, but I thought this was Holtz to the hilt! :
http://uscsports.ocsn.com/sports/m-foot ... 03aaa.html

Man -- that's a great picture of him in that link! I want to look that good when I'm his age!

man that is so true... im the exact same way on that note! good answer!

Wonderful answers! This getting to know you thing is a great idea

You can learn so many new things about people!

That is hilarious. Obviously that book wasn't very good.

Haha Great responses ATNO/TW. I actually do know what a leisure suit is by the way .

Hey - thanks for all the great comments folks. I am a little dissapointed, however, that no one picked up on the fact that I knew my age to the minute! *grin

how did u know it to the minute. i mean you would half to know the minute that u were born and so on and so on

Correct. I actually screwed up. I must have been thinking from my dad's birthday. It should have been 24 days, not 15, and 9 minutes not 1 -- I remember I did calculate 24 days, and not sure why I posted 15 other than I was posting on the 15th. July 21, 1959 at 5:35 PM EST

Actually it was very good. A key example is the fact that I not only remembered the title of the book after 20 years, I also remember the author is Tony Buzan. The book is still available at amazon.com.

In addition, I'm almost certain I remember the date was March 23rd 1984. I also remember having veal marsala for dinner. I believe the manager's name was George, and I clearly remember the parent restaurant was in NYC. I also remember having a business card I was using for a bookmark at the time.

Also, I remember combining techniques in that book and another to memorize the Knight's Tour. The Knight's Tour is a series of chess moves using a knight to move around a chess board in it's standard "L" configuration and touch all 64 squares once and only once. Essentially this can be done by placing the knight on any random square on a chess board and going from there. I memorized only one variation of it, but admittedly I haven't done that in over 15 years, and no longer have the sequence memorized. It is a great little puzzle and has a number of solutions.

Here's the puzzle if anyone wants to take a shot at it:
http://enchantedmind.com/puzzles/knights/knight.html

(I'll post solutions at a later date if anyone is interested. You could cheat and use google, but try it first)

Oh, man!! Happy day! On a whim, I just Google'd for Picolo Mondo's and they have one right here in Pittsburgh! Who'd have thunk it!

Wow, the life and times of ATNO/TW, interesting

Provides more depth into who you are as a person and not as a forum nick, thank you for sharing such information