Tagged - Five things you did not know about me
I just happened to see that Brendan Enrick tagged me, thanks a lot! :) After having read several of these by other's like: Scott Guthrie, Steven Smith, Rob Howard, Paul Wilson, Shawn Wildermuth, Brendon Schwartz, Ted Neward and so on, I really have to say that I'm excited to participate and pass it on. So, I'm tagging: Paul Ballard, Caleb Jenkins, Markus Egger, Kevin McNeish and Keith Nicholson. UPDATE: Markus Egger just informed me he just recently did this and it can be found here, so I'm tagging: Chris Menegay.
1. I lived in Guantanamo Bay Cuba for two years when my step-father, who was Gunnery Sergeant in the Marine Corps, was stationed there. While there, I studied a tradional Okinawan style of martial arts - Isshinryu Karate for two solid years (during junior high/middle school). I obtained the highest rank that my instructor, Sensei Norman W. Johnson, could provide - green belt. I keep telling myself that I will start back one of these days, since achieving a black belt is still a goal of mine. The hardest part is determining which style I would want to take, since Isshinryu would be pretty difficult to find in Tulsa. So, I believe I will wait until I relocate to Houston in a few years, since it looks as though I could find one there easier.
2. It was also while in Cuba, I was given the choice for getting straight A's in 7th grade, to either get a microscope or a Commodore 64. I chose the computer of course, otherwise I would probably be a microbiologist or some other type of scientist, instead of a computer nerd. Mostly learning while typing in code from Compute magazine and others back then, I picked up BASIC easily and even dabbled with Assembly Language. Upon moving to Tulsa right after Cuba, I bought my first 300 baud modem, promptly returned it the next day for a 1200 baud. Then started up multiple Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) using the Commodore 64, then the 128 and later my first XT.
3. I had long hair in high school and wore a leather biker jacket, my 9th Grade Christmas present, no matter what the weather. In driver's education I met my high school sweet heart (who's now my wife) and I blame her or my long hair for failing my first driver's test.
4. I have been the singer in 3 or 4 heavy metal garage bands starting back in high school and most recently back in 2005. After giving up on finding the right guys to be in a band with, I decided to focus on becoming a .NET Super Star instead of a Rock Star.
5. Like many others I enjoy playing games, especially the first person shooter's like Doom and Quake, but haven't had the time in several years. I have thought working for a game development company would be the coolest job.
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About dwalker
David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.
His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.
After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.
Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.
He is the current President of the
Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.