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Hello and
welcome. I was born in a little town in West Virginia and
lived half my life in a small Ohio town. There were rolling
hills, farms, and small towns not unlike Mayberry from the Andy
Griffith show. In that small town, I developed my love for
science, technology, building and experimenting.
We were
an average family for the time with just one wage earner, my father.
He loved to build things and was also interested in science and the
future. In those days, if you had money, you bought things, if
you didn't, you made things. Perhaps this is where I got my
love of making things. This love has carried through my life
in my jobs, businesses and entrepreneurial endeavors.
When I
was a kid, I had a chemistry set and Lionel train set, like many
boys of the time. I experimented with many chemical reactions.
I even made gunpowder for making fireworks for the 4th of July.
Luckily, the only explosion I had was when I tried to make homemade
root beer, and the glass bottles broke because they couldn't take
the pressure. I also got interested from a friend in model
rockets and electronics. I launched many rockets and
experimented with all sorts of electronic circuits. This
proved helpful when I got a job in high school at a TV repair shop.
I went to college for Space Sciences in Florida, unfortunately this
was at the end of the Apollo era when many space scientists were
being laid off. I got interested in physics, and finished my
degree in that. Graduate school followed in physics and
engineering.
I took my first professional job at the
Underwater Systems Center in New London Connecticut in December
1978 as an analyst. Wow, where does time go? I had the privilege to
work with many fine engineers and scientists for eighteen years
until the government decided to close the lab in one of their stupid
cost cutting measures. I continued at another lab for a few
years in Newport, Rhode Island, but it wasn't the same.
Next I
took a job at a research institute in Providence, Rhode Island.
There I worked with a great bunch of scientists on advanced graphic
techniques and distance learning. The Rhode Island center
closed down and I started a company with another employee to exploit
the distance learning software I had written.
Part way
through my professional career, I realized that I would never get to
do the things I really love doing unless I started my own company.
Thus GITek was born. It had a few false starts under other
names, but when I started getting requests from people to help them
with problems both in computers and engineering, I knew I had hit on
something. And at the very least, I could consult in these
areas which I do today. My years of analysis, problem
solving, engineering, and software development for the government
finally began to pay off. As a full-time entrepreneur, I have
had the unique opportunity to work on a wide variety of problems, and
each day is a new adventure.
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