About

After 35 plus years in various sales and marketing positions at Tektronix, I retired in August of 2006. My last position, Field Application Engineer, was the most enjoyable since I was able to exercise my technical skills but at the same time take advantage of my sales experience. The group I worked for, Test and Measurement, was the core product line for Tek. For those of you who are technically inclined, the products I supported included Oscilloscopes, Logic Analyzers and Spectrum Analyzers. Since many of our products included embedded PC’s much of my time was spent writing software to demonstrate capability, deal with customer issues and in some cases add functionality to the product. The rest of my time, other than meetings, was spent playing “Demo Boy”. Demo Boy traveled around our region (VA, MD, PA, OH and WV) demonstrating the capabilities of our products. The neat thing was that I got to play with these high tech “toys” and was able to assist customers in some very interesting applications.

Although I dabbled in creating web sites while working, I decided to give it a whirl as a part time job in retirement. While at Tek, I used C, C++, C#, Java and Visual Basic for programming languages. Since we used Microsoft .NET framework in some of our instrument interfaces, I was able to use this experience to create .NET web sites. My personal site prior to this one was created using .NET. However, I soon learned that to create spiffy looking sites I needed Macromedia Flash. I bought Macromedia’s Studio 8 which included Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks. These tools allowed me to do some neat graphics and simplified creating sites. It also meant that I had to learn some Flash Actionscript. Update 2/20/2012: I’ve stopped using Flash since the iPhone and iPad do not support it.

I have also used Frontpage and Joomla to create sites. Frontpage is rather limited in what it can do. Joomla is neat but in my experience, it is a pig when using it on a remote hosted account. I have also learned to do some PHP scripting and am considering it as a replacement for .NET. Upgrading MS .NET to the latest version is kind of costly for a casual user like me. PHP is Open Source and powerful but does not have the debugging capabilities of .NET. Update 2/20/2012: WordPress is now my website development tool of choice. It’s not just a Blog website tool now and with the right theme you can do just about anything you want without a lot of effort.

What I have learned from this part time job is that creating web sites is not a money making enterprise. I have made a few bucks but much of the work is Pro Bono. I tend to treat it as more of a hobby and hopefully it will keep the gray matter stimulated. Update 2/20/2012: All the websites I work on are now done Pro Bono. Below is a list of sites I have built or maintain.