Ewsraven

This won't be pretty until I figure out the wiki markup and add cites, for now I'll just stub in the main facts. More narrative, formatting, and spell check to follow. If you catch anything, please let me know via my talk page.

Born in West Virginia, grew up in Ohio, I consider myself a Buckeye. I love the Mountain Momma's raw force of nature in her peaks and valleys, though, and missed that more than anything else in the years I spent away from home in the military.

My adult life to date consists of three main eras. It started with a 13-year military career in the 328x3 (Electronic Warfare Systems Technician) career field. I followed that with a 5-year stay in the halls of academia obtaining first an Associates degree in Math, and then a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. I then worked for the Department of Treasury for 11 years as an IT specialist. Government job titles tend to be generic to prevent easy translation into civilian job descriptions, and thus an employee absconding with government-paid knowledge. However, my BSCS degree program concentrated on Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), specifically C++, and I ended up specializing in Java (including J2EE) and XML/Schema. I recently retired from everything, and am once again starting over, so with nothing better to do at the moment, I am doing this!

My Military Career

I started out in 1977, when after basic training I attended Electronic Warfare tech school at Keesler AFB in Mississippi. At the time, we (the U.S.) still had friendly relations with Iran, and Iranian officers were attending classes in the same EW school (you'll see the irony of this if you read through). I proceeded to the 834 Component Repair Squadron of 1st SOW at Hurlburt Field, FL (Eglin Auxiliary Field 9) after tech school, and except for a 15 month exodus from the AF at the end of my first enlistment, and a 15 month tour at Osan AB, ROK, I spent the next 13 years of my life stationed at various Air Force bases in Florida (Hurlburt, Homestead, Patrick). I suffered tremendously from this reverse form of waterboarding.

I learned 20-plus systems at Hurlburt during my 3 years there, and became very proficient in nearly all of them. Not all were electronic systems, some were as simple as the electrical control systems for ejecting flares and chaff. One system was a sensor system called the Black Crow (AN/ASD-5) on AC-130 gunships that probably should have been maintained by the sensor shop. I remember one gunship in particular, I believe it was 6568, that was nicknamed "Old Brass Belly" because it had its undercarriage basically shot off by AAA during a mission in Vietnam over the Ho Chi Minh trail, and came back for a mostly wheels-up belly landing.

The base commander at that time was Colonel Dunwoody. He had every building on base painted a particular sky blue shade of color that we began calling "Dunwoody Blue." Even Olive Drab (O.D.) the standard military issue color of everything, was preferable to Dunwoody Blue. It reminds me now of country kitchen blue.

Following the Iranian takeover of our embassy on Nov. 4, 1979, I volunteered to be the EWS tech representative for a series of January, 1980 deployments on a Combat Talon to prepare and test a specialized system for use in the upcoming rescue attempt. I deployed to Egypt with about 100 other maintenance personnel as a member of JTF 1-79 for Operation Rice Bowl (as it was listed on our orders, otherwise known as Operation Eagle Claw, which was actually the first insertion/penetration phase).

The maintenance group I deployed with at the b eginning of April, 1980 was sent to an old Russian/Egyptian air base at a place called Wadi Kena (Wadi Qina on the map) and we were given an old MIG hangar to stay in for the next few weeks. We could physically see and identify with our radar detecting equipment a Russian SA3 SAM site on a nearby hill overlooking our base. During our entire stay there, we had to stow our gear and disappear inside every afternoon around 3PM, when a Russian satellite passed over.

Delta arrived just days before Eagle Claw, and they stayed in the hangar next to ours, maybe 50 yards away. After the failed rescue attempt on April 24-25 of 1980, they drank up a huge amount of our beer rations, holding extensive late night drink-a-thons with our beer ration every night. From the accounts I've read, they stayed very inebriated for several days. Snipers were posted on the roofs of the surrounding buildings in case of retaliation. I learned later that there was some concern the Russians had blown our cover to the Iranians, which may have played a part in the mission cancellation that led to the disaster at Desert One.

After we returned to Hurlburt, we spent the next 9 months practicing a second mission, until President Reagan's inauguration when the hostages were released. Those of us deployed for the mission received the Humanitarian Award, and the 1st SOW received the AF Outstanding Unit Award that year and the next.

During November of 1980, I deployed to Nellis AFB with some UH-1Ns and CH-3s to participate in the annual Red Flag (red on blue force assessment and training). While there, I was promised a Huey ride on a training mission that also included a promised detour over the Bunny Ranch (presumably at low level). However, the morning of that mission, the MGM Grand Hotel had a major fire in which many people died, and our helicopters were deployed to rescue people from the roof, and ended up saving many lives. The scary part about that - I was in the MGM casino after midnite, during the time when reports indicate that the fire had already begun burning in the adjacent walls and ceiling.

I lived off base my last year at Hurlburt, in a small cottage on Cinco Bayou right behind the Eglin Federal Credit Union on Eglin Parkway in Fort Walton Beach. I had a chance to buy the place for $20,000, and will always regret that I didn't. Shortly after I left the area, the housing along that stretch of the bayou was bought out by a company that built upscale condos.

This was the best living quarters and situation of any of my assignments. Fort Walton Beach is a paradise (or at least was then), as anyone who's been there knows. A popular place at the time was the Hog's Breath Saloon (motto: Hog's Breath Is Better Than No Breath At All), which was featured in the movie Jaws II. The movie was mostly filmed just down the coast at Navarre Beach.

Darts were a common pastime in Fort Walton Beach, I became an expert playing for a team including several members of my EWS shop. My name was frequently in the paper for throwing one or more tons, darter slang for 100+ points with a single turn of 3 darts. One member of our team was Capt. Hal Lewis, a Combat Talon pilot who perished at Desert One in Iran.

Little known fact - a now-defunct short cross runway at the southern end of Hurlburt's main runway was the runway where Col. Jimmy Doolittle and his Raiders practiced their carrier takeoffs for the Raid On Tokyo following Pearl Harbor.

One of the neatest things about that assignment was that the HH-53s used to practice combat assualt take-offs and landings right in front of our shop, which was at the southern end of the main runway. Those big old birds can really fly, and are highly maneuverable. We were told that at that time, they were the only helicopter that could actually fly upside down, they had so much rotor surface and lift. The Combat Talons also used to practice the Fulton Recovery System snatch and grabs right in front of our shop, and they used live people. I heard later that sometime in the early 1980s, a person died after being picked up that way, he became disoriented and walked off the tail ramp after being disconnected from his harness.

My disappointment with that mission outcome led to a 15-month exodus to civilian life starting in 1981 when my first enlistment expired. I reenlisted (thank you President Reagan for the reenlistment bonus) in 1982 because the economy still hadn't quite recovered from the Carter years, and I just flat missed the camaraderie. I received orders to the 31st Tactical Fighter Wing at Homestead AFB, FL where I worked on F4-Ds for 2-1/2 years . One of these was the tail number flown by Col. Steve Ritchie in Vietnam when he shot down 5 MIGs and became an ace (I even met him once at Homestead on a publicity tour).

Not much happened there (only a couple systems to work on, and they were pretty old Vietnam-era systems on their last legs), except the area was almost as enjoyable as the Gulf Coast had been. I spent a lot of time lobster hunting, fishing, camping, snorkeling, and sailing down in the Keys. A favorite hangout was Gilberts in Key Largo, watching from the Tiki Bar as boats sailed under the raised drawbridge on US1/A1A. There were a couple other favorites, one also in southern Key Largo where I used to rent a small Hobie Cat and take my dog Missy sailing out among the lesser Keys with a cooler full of liquid refreshment lashed to the mast, and the other one was in Islamorada where the power boat circuit and Jimmy Buffet occasionally stopped in.

I also got to know Miami a little, and went to the first CART race in downtown Miami in 1985. The condos where I lived (14997 SW 280 St., Naranja Lakes) off base appear from satellite photos to have been totally levelled by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. I returned to Homestead from Patrick AFB several years later to attend NCO Leadership school, from which I graduated with honors.

In 1985, I got orders to 6903 Electronic Security Group (Skivvy-Nine) at Osan AB, Korea, and interim orders to attend a class at a civilian contractor's facilities near Washington, D.C. There, I was introduced to a new ground-based system affiliated with the U-2R program. I went to Korea, where we replaced the existing aged system with the new one. Work and play in Korea were the most interesting and eventful 15 months of my life.

I returned home on leave in January of 1986, and watched on CNN at home as reporters talked about a massive and fatal fuel depot explosion on Hill 180 at Osan, in the exact location and near the same time where I walked to work every day. On my return to Korea a week later, I watched the Challenger disaster on a TV in the St. Louis airport terminal (interesting because I became peripherally involved in the reemergence of the space shuttle program a couple of years later).

My time in Korea aged me several years, as I worked rotating 12 hour shifts of 2 on, 2 off (rotating around 3AM/PM) the entire time. The hours were demanding, I worked a two-day 3PM-3AM shift, then with two days off, I had the rest of that day and the next before returning to work at 3AM, exactly 48 hours after leaving the last shift. However, after a two-day 3AM-3PM shift, the next break only lasted only 36 hours until the next shift arrived at 3AM 1-1/2 days later, so it wasn't a true 2 day off break. We worked through weekends and holidays, and I lost all track of time there.

I left Korea with orders to Patrick AFB, FL to help establish Operating Location BA of the 6947 Electronic Security Squadron out of Key West NAS. At OLBA, I maintained the airborne platform of the ground system I had helped to replace in Korea, which had been relocated to Key West. While an interesting assignment, the system was being phased out and was aging technology by that time. As a small shop (about 10 or so assigned personnel, along with several contractors), I was assigned the sole responsibility to create and maintain several key programs, including the technical library, the tool program, the On the Job Training (OJT) program, and the Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) program.

We did some interesting things at Patrick. The space shuttle program was re-emerging after the Challenger disaster, and after the first launch (which we witnessed from the roof of our hangar, about 15-20 miles south from Cape Canaveral on the coast)), they discovered missing heat shield panels, which still occur to this day. NASA approached our unit and worked out an agreement where our U-2 would fly with the camera configuration and from several miles away and above, it would capture the next launch on film to help them capture the tile loss incidents on film. This was a tricky undertaking, since the U-2 normally flies level and covers terrestrial territory with a fixed camera aperture. For this purpose, it had to execute a slow roll while keeping the camera locked on the ascending shuttle. The pilot succeeded brilliantly, however, and we each got copies of some of the resulting pictures.

On that mission, the pilot (who was the U-2 squadron commander) flew directly over our hangar afterwards and signalled us with a short contrail when he was directly overhead. With a few minutes advance notice, we had formed up outside the hangar in the shape of a 5 (the 9th SRW, Det. 5 out of Beale AFB owned and operated the aircraft). When he signalled us with the contrail (we couldn't see him otherwise, he was so high up), we all signaled back at him with some typically American hand gestures, and he captured us on film. We also got copies of that picture.

The shuttle at that time routinely landed out west (usually White Sands Missile Range, where I had deployed during the preparations for a second rescue attempt out of Hurlburt), and returned to Kennedy Space Center (KSC) piggy-backed on a specially configured 747. Apparently the 747 crew liked to catch a glimpse of our U-2 out in front of our hangar, and would first fly in from the west directly over our hangar at a fairly low altitude, and then bank sharply north up the coast toward KSC.

After a near loss of one of our U-2s, in which a chase car called a pilot into the ground with wheels up (the pilot was doing touch-and-goes for training time, and on his final landing approach he forgot that the low-level warning signal was turned off and so without the warning forgot to lower the wheels, and the chase car didn't notice or warn him because they forgot he was on final), the unit was deactivated in 1990. Our hangar was turned over to a Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics Matters flying unit. The unit flew drug interdiction and crop dusting against coca growers in South America. I was on the way out of the AF at the time, after having a drastic meeting with a drunk driver in December of 1988 that basically ended my military career. I went through three years of physical therapy but was unable to meet minimum physical fitness standards, even with waivers.

I spent my last year at Patrick as the AF liaison to the State Dept. unit, where I met some very colorful characters flying the crop dusters. These guys were all ex-Air America pilots from the Vietnam era who loved to live dangerously. Their Patrick AFB time was basically an R&R rotation, so they lived it up. They told tales of flying through jungle valleys and hitting wires strung by the coca growers to damage their planes. One of the pilots was seriously wounded after his helicopter was shot down by the terrorists guarding the growers and processing facilities. He received an award from a visiting State Department bigwig for heroism in the ensuing gun battle (in which other Americans had died).

I wired the hangar for their mainframe computer system that performed their logistical tracking, and helped them get set up and integrated with base ops and the supply channels. They initially had a State Department civilian commander who had done time in Vietnam, but he retired to the Cocoa Beach area and was replaced by a military commander who remained in charge of the unit after I left. He was an Army Colonel helicopter pilot who had commanded an Apache Squadron during Desert Storm. He seemed affected by the experience and wouldn't talk about it, though we got word that he had been involved in a shooting gallery situation where a lot of Iraqis died.

My College Experience

I started under the Veteran's Administration Chapter 31 Vocational Rehabilitation program in January of 1993 at a local technical college, Washington State Community College (WSCC), which has nothing to do with the state of Washington. This college is affiliated with Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and its curriculum was designed with the assistance of OU staff. WSCC had an excellent transfer agreement with OU, and I embarked on a degree in Math Transfer in order to pursue a computer science degree at OU.

I got involved in the student life at WSCC, though I was a returning adult. I began tutoring math almost right away (after the first quarter), and a high degree of success and growing demand led me to start a math lab for the tutoring program that continues to this day. I was elected student senate president my second year, and joined the Phi Theta Kappa honor society, where I was elected the student senate representative on the society's executive board. I started an annual car wash to benefit the local domestic violence shelter, started an annual Christmas party at a local senior citizen's center, volunteered at the domestic violence shelter, volunteered at a local school for disabled persons, and volunteered for the annual Special Olympics. I graduated with honors after 10 quarters due to some remedial classes in English and math to refresh my now-stale high school learning.

I started at OU the next quarter, and because of the extended commute (45 minute trip to OU from home, versus a 15 minute trip to WSCC from home) I had to cut back on tutoring and volunteering. After my first year, I targeted the U.S. Department of Treasury, Bureau of the Public Debt (BPD) for a co-op job since it was virtually in my hometown (I lived just across the Ohio river from BPD). Once I got the co-op job at BPD, I cut back one class a quarter and worked straight through until I graduated, also with honors. I had to commute a lot, sometimes twice a day, and with the part-time work at BPD, I stretched my OU time into another 10 quarters.

My Government Civilian Career

My time working for (BPD) was a dichotomy. It was both the high point of learning and experience in a job I enjoyed immensely for its challenges and depth of technical work, and the lowest point of my lifetime experience with people, as I worked in an organization that refused to emerge from the dark ages. It actively discouraged improvement, and even punished anyone who pointed out flaws within the system. There can be no truer real-life example of the Dilbert cartoons than that place. I had so many Dilbert cartoon clippings plastered around my desk and cubicle that it looked like poor man's wallpaper.

The coding shop at BPD is unionized by the National Treasury Employees Union, a partisan liberal Democratic organization that spends member's dues on liberal political activities without member authorization, and in support of liberal political candidates (activities since curtailed by the Hatch Act). I initially belonged to the union, but after they failed to assist me when I was physically assaulted by my manager, I stopped giving them my hard-earned money.

Management would not allow anyone to point out any shortcomings in their dysfunctional software development process since it inevitably stepped on someone's toes and led to union problems. Anyone who stuck their head above the crowd had it promptly hammered back down. Management and lead jobs were almost always awarded to more senior legacy system programmers, and those that didn't always resulted in union grievances. The problem was that BPD was originally located in Washington, D.C., but was moved to its current location by the patron saint of WV, Robert C. Byrd. Its D.C. employees were invited to move with it, and many of them did, bringing the union mentality with them.

Don't get me wrong here, unions have their place, especially in manufacturing and mining workplaces where safety is a critical concern. But this was a white-collar high-tech coding shop, and the union presence basically kept it in the dark ages in spite of all my efforts to bring it into the 21st century. Management openly maintained the mentality that their primary purpose was to supply jobs, and their secondary purpose was to use those jobs to manage the public debt.

I was warned about this when I started there, but I laughed it off. I eventually learned the hard way that it was too entrenched to overcome. Time and again I was reeled in by paranoid managers who saw a union grievance around every corner.

When I started at BPD as a co-op student employee, nearly everyone in the coding shop was a mainframe programmer, originally keypunch operators or secretaries who worked their way up the employment ladder by becoming a mainframe programmer trainee. Very few of them had formal computer science educations, and those that did had outdated degrees in mainframe procedural programming languages (mostly COBOL). Programming jobs at that time (1996) were still considered a standard rung in the ladder of achievement at BPD. Employees would apply for programming jobs and get trained with a few week's courses. Only since about 2005 have they begun hiring younger college grads to replace the older retirees, and only because of this attrition does BPD have a chance to hold on to the gains that were achieved. However, most of these new hires do not have true computer science degrees, just information systems degrees. Anyone with a hardcore object-oriented computer science education knows the difference.

Anyhow, I started out working with and learning several different languages, and finally settled on Java when I wrote a servlet-based application for a special Treasury program called State and Local Government Securities (SLGS). SLGS enables non-Federal government agencies (states, municipalities, etc.) to invest specially-regulated funds (such as retirement funds or municipal bonds) in government-regulated securities. The application I wrote gave those agencies a secure online interface to manage their portfolios.

That was quickly followed with another Java servlet app for our own intranet that enabled logging and tracking of the massive amounts of public correspondence that Public Debt receives and processes every day. Most of this correspondence concerned the dispensation of savings bonds from private citizens who had either lost their bonds or were serving as executor of an estate. This app rolled up dozens of existing peripheral systems working disparately within the different branches and sections of BPD that handled this correspondence. During the work on this app I began learning Business Process Reengineering (BPR).

Also at this point, the union factor reared its ugly head when a senior team member with no expertise in Java became jealous of my technical lead status, since I was the junior member of the team and she had recently been demoted after a desk audit, and she filed a union grievance. As a result of her grievance, she replaced me as the tech lead. I believe management deliberately did this to test her, because she promptly screwed it up so bad that she had to leave the team, and abruptly transferred to another office and away from programming. I then had to clean up the huge mess she had left behind, all while working from my now-union designated junior team member status. I still have no idea what a union is doing in a coding shop.

Java was emerging as a popular language at the time, and with the advent of the Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE) that supported such enterprise services as security, hierarchical directory services, logging, data communications across platforms, and maturing technologies such as Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), XML, servlets/JSPs (Java Server pages), robust database communications, and standardized payment services, I headed a small team to design and implement an enterprise Java framework for future application development.

I designed approximately 90-95% of the framework, and pioneered the use of Unified Modeling Language at BPD by using it to document the framework design. I directed all of the research that identified and incorporated standard OOP design patterns that were used in the framework. I also directed the contractors that built the majority of the system, and afterwards the BPD development team that finished it.

Nobody else on the team had Object-Oriented experience or knowledge, let alone J2EE, so I had to train them on it as the project progressed. I got very little credit for either the design or implementation, with senior legacy developers demanding to lead the project and receiving most of the credit. I spent the majority of my time having to teach them complex concepts on the fly while trying to incorporate the technology in the framework, and these efforts were frequently futile due to their ignorance of the technologies. Producing a framework that worked was no small accomplishment in the face of these obstacles.

The framework supplied simple plug points, which are logical points where developers could write fairly simple user interface and data request code and plug them into the app to be called dynamically. All the developers at that time were unfamiliar with Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) and the corresponding distributed technologies, but after a few one-week courses to familiarize themselves with the Java language syntax and some rudimentary training on the framework, they were able to begin developing apps on the framework. This framework is now the underlying application architecture for BPD's TreasuryDirect account management system and for all new application development.

I went on to pioneer the use of XML technologies at BPD to publish various financial documents to different federal government budgetary agencies, Federal Reserve financial entities (such as Bank Of New York), and civilian news agencies, including the online auctions of bonds and securities that Treasury regularly conducts. I established some basic XML rules for BPD that persist today: first, I demanded that all XML/Schema documents follow W3C specifications; I demanded that all XML documents were based on strongly-typed schemas with relevant database field representations; I established a schema-versioning framework that used schema names and locations on BPD's web site to establish a unique namespace that contained the schema document version information (one of several schema versioning options, clearly the most robust); I demanded that all schema-based XML documents contain the required schema referrals so that any W3C-compliant XML processing software could validate any of BPD's XML documents to the corresponding schema contained on BPD's web site; I demanded that all dynamically-generated XML documents (generated in realtime by server-side application code, versus manually created static documents) were validated server-side against a public schema prior to publishing, which guarantees that only valid documents are published and resolves the potential for client-side validation issues with non-standard browsers; and I set up a framework for XML processing that enabled portability across domains via simple configuration changes.

I also designed every XML document and schema on Public Debt's TreasuryDirect web site (though most are not visible to the public, just to specially-authorized consumers who were given the timing and naming scheme under which the documents are published). I also assisted several other government organizations and Federal Reserve Banks by supplying them with the latest technologies and methodologies to robustly consume BPD's XML documents and the financial data they contained.

I also pioneered a method of dynamic application structuring on top of the framework that allowed functionality to be added to an existing application without redeploying and testing the entire application. However, management did not understand it and I was not able to convince the legacy programmers in charge of the development teams that it was worth pursuing. I frequently ran into this wall due to management not promoting anyone who was fluent in new technologies. The accomplishments I was able to see through to completion took its toll on me, because every one was a protracted battle, and I had to prove myself over and over without being granted any expertise. I don't know if it was specifically the union or just entrenched legacy systems developer mentality, but either way I'm glad to be out of that place.

The injuries sustained in the accident with the drunken driver in 1988 eventually caught up with my desk job, and I had to call it quits. Now I'm just relaxing and seeking meaningful ways of staying relevant.