Owen Forgot to Run the Loader - Again

Software Engineers give lots of demos of the software they develop.  I’ve been thinking back to some demos I have done over the years and have started crafting some posts for the more memorable of those. Here is the first one of those posts – about my first demo.

For the first two years of my career at IBM, I was a Systems Engineer at IBM’s Federal Systems Division in Gaithersburg, MD. This was weird job and I really didn’t have a passion for it, though I was pretty good at it. You would develop system configurations of IBM hardware and software, identify 3rd party products, and identify custom software and integrations that would all be part of proposals for large-scale DOD contracts for which IBM was bidding. You would help prepare these massive proposals in response to RFPs. Sometimes the work involved developing prototypes as part of the contract acquisition process, but that was about the extent of the software engineering we were involved in the during the pre-award phase.

There’s No Crying in Baseball!

Growing up, I always prided myself on the fact that I was pretty low-maintenance as a kid. I didn’t bitch and moan or cry much about anything. Mom certainly wouldn’t tolerate any of that former stuff so, assuming I even tried to play that game with her, that behavior would have been corrected immediately in the traditional Mom way. Problem solved. As far as the latter cry-baby stuff goes, I think I got that out of my system on a bizarre trip to Pittsburgh to see the Pirates play the Mets on August 10, 1970 (right before I would start 3rd Grade at McNelis Catholic).

(In Third Grade, we would all have to deal with Sister Joseph Ann. But that is the subject of another post.)

As I have stated in previous blog entries, we were a single car family. However, by virtue of his employment at the Pennsylvania Railroad/Penn Central/Conrail, my Dad had access to free passes for train travel. This was pretty sweet for us. There wasn’t much disposable income in our family. There certainly wasn’t extra cash laying around in an emergency fund that could be used to make major repairs to our only car. So my Dad was very paranoid about long trips in our car – those were to be avoided if at all possible. When we did have to use the car for a long trip, it seemed that Dad could never relax, always worrying.