About the Author

After graduation from FSU in May 1996, I worked as a summer intern at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory's Air Traffic Control Group (formerly the Weather Sensing Group) field office at the Orlando International Airport on a project to deploy, maintain, and verify the Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS).

That about does it for my weather background, unfortunately. That is why I have maintained this web page and other weather web pages for my hometown (Evanaville, Indiana), and my only other hometown, Chicago. I would like to someday get back into weather but I would like to have it be secondary to an IT position. An ideal job would be working on UNIX machines for a weather company. I am very detail-oriented and enjoy the IT side of things, and it would be great to work on weather projects while applying what I know in the IT world.

After being out of a job from October 1996, I left the Meteorology field and took a job in January 1997 with the Cellular Networks and Space Sector of Motorola in Arlington Heights, IL. My first job was monitoring Motorola's CDMA infrastructure systems for Motorola's PrimeCo. customer. As I sat there doing mindless work of watching a screen for red, orange or yellow alarms, I learned the system & how to troubleshoot it. After a few months I moved out "onto the floor" and began to take calls from customers & Motorola associates all over the world.

In late 1997, I became the contact in the support center for the Hong Kong account and in April 1998 I went to Hong Kong for a little more than a week to work on many issues that had piled up. A similar trip to Korea occurred in November 1998 and I had caught the travel bug. In June 1999, I transferred to a system engineering & tactical support group with advanced personnel.

In that position, I worked on a team that performed software upgrades in many markets and also worked on major issues in the Asia/Pac markets. In October 1999, I was moved to a rapid deployment team within the same organization and spent a month and a half in Argentina working on a team to deploy the new system in Buenos Aires. In early 2000, I was assigned to work on a project to help streamline the process of getting anew, working system out to the field. I worked in a warehouse where the processes were set up that are still used today for new systems.

After that project was over, I joined a tactical support team in the same group with 4 other people and we worked on difficult issues with development and product field support teams. In late 2000, the group was disbanded and luckily I was picked up by the deployment & test team. Our team became the Asia/Pac deployment team and we concentrated on China. I have been to China 7 times now and have been to Beijing, Changchun, Jilin City, Nanchang, QinHuangDao and Songyuan.

In 2003, I was moved to a team to support our new India customer, Tata, as they started to ramp up the deployment of Motorola equipment in their expanding network. In October 2003, I went to India for the first time and have been there 7 or 8 times since. I have visited Mumbai, New Delhi, Pune, Bangalore, Chandigarh and of course everyone must go to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. I also went to Bandung, Indonesia in 2004 to help with a system upgrade (and I was an expensive delivery boy because I was bringing the software to do the upgrade!).

So that about says it all. I'd like to get back into weather, and I would volunteer at the Ft. Worth NWS office if I was in the country more. From October 2003-December 2004, this was my travel schedule:

• Oct. 6-Nov. 1 - Mumbai, India
• Nov. 12 for approx. 10 days - Bangkok, Thailand
• Jan. 5-19 - Mumbai, India
• Jan. 20-21 - Hong Kong
• Feb. 3-Mar. 1 - Mumbai & Pune, India
• Mar. 20-Apr. 20 - Bandung, Indonesia; Delhi, Pune & Mumbai, India
• July 5 for approx. 2 weeks - Beijing & Bangalore, India
• Oct. 18-Nov. 8 - Mumbai, Chandigarh & Delhi, India
• Dec. 1-19 - Delhi, India