Skills
Ted's History With Technology
My background has a wide range of skills leveraging computer technology; while my education and early career focused on business administration, I quickly found my real enjoyment in "working" was when work started to feel actually feel like "fun". That happened when I bridged by early career experience at Heiser Automotive with technology. A rough chronology of my career and how technology guided it below!
1980's
My first computer was an IBM PCjr a great starter computer, 5 1/4" floppy drive and 128k memory. Great for learning how to write some basic, and running Lotus 1-2-3. A spreadsheet.... can you imagine work before spreadsheets? It was the first real computer I had put to some practical use. I graduated from college in 1987, and from there, eventually worked my way up to a Leading Edge 386 with a whopping 40MB hard drive. Seemed like a huge change from just a few years earlier with the 128k memory and no hard drive.
In the later '80s as I finished school, I transitioned to full time employment with Heiser Automotive. Heiser is a large dealership in metro Milwaukee, and our rental department was one of the few organizations that targeted people without credit cards. For a mere $75 to $250 deposit, we'd let you rent a car, provided we could verify employment, do a credit check, and look you up in a reverse directory. Occasionally a car would disappear, but they'd always show up somewhere (skip tracing is a whole different story). The operation was very manual - writing the contracts by hand, managing the reservations, inventory. And while managing a 4 site operation provided good business experience, after several years of this of operating manually, I was looking for a change.
Hence, my first career intersection with technology. I researched, proposed and helped implement an early WAN to automate our business. We installed a server - a generic 286 box running some flavor of Unix, and dumb terminals linked at the remote sites by early multi-tech modems. Installing the WAN, and seeing the change in how we managed our reservations, our inventory, down to how the contracts were printed - this was a real joy - technology changing the fundamental way in how we did business. Even so, the automotive business has it's limits, and it was time for a change.
1990's
The 1990's were probably the most exciting for me in my career, given that I had found a passion for technology, and could now tie it to my job. While I had thoroughly enjoyed deploying the WAN at Heiser, I sought to make technology more central to what I did for a living. Funny how opportunities present themselves. One day I had a piece of a newspaper flying through my backyard in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. I reached down to pick up that newspaper, and noticed a help wanted ad for "T&T Computers" in Manitowoc. A small company started by John Torrison and Peter Tait, later called "Data Plus" was a provider of PCs, Networks, repair services - a VAR or value added reseller of PCs. The position was for a commercial sales representative - selling PCs and Networks - I felt fully qualified, given I had just installed a WAN, so off I went, applied and had a job. I learned a lot in my time spent at Data Plus - we sold Novell and LANtastic networks to businesses in Manitowoc and Sheboygan counties, targeting the new need for companies to have a server to share and store files, along with the networking of peripherals.
Software: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Visio, Project, Tableau 8.0, Minitab 14, MediaWiki, Avaya CentreVu, ISC Irene WFM, Verint WFM, Aspect WFM, Seibel CRM, Xcelsius, Unipress Footprints, PageMaker, Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Paint Shop Pro, Shockwave, Robohelp, Flash, and Adobe Exchange/Distiller/Reader
Platforms / Operating Systems: Windows 95/98/2000/XP/Win7, DOS, Linux, Unix, Novell, LANtastic, and BSDI
Networking / Web Development: Groupwise, SendMail, POP3, SMTP, TCP/IP, Eudora, Pine, Ethernets, DNS, subnetting, LAN, WAN, FTP, Telnet, Shockwave, Robohelp, and Flash
Programming Languages: Basic, Visual Basic, Fortran, HTML, PERL, PHP, SQL, and Java
