Professional Life

I am a Software Engineer, with a B.Comp.E and B.S. in Comp.Sci, with experience in embedded software. My full resume is here for those interested in the technical details. Check out the vintage picture on the left from my college TA days. Those are actually computers we used for one of our labs, but were being retired. I can't remember the OS, but it was command line (not PC-DOS), monochrome monitors, with integrated 5.25" disk drives. I merged two pictures, as you can tell by the hue mismatch.

I am employed and not expecting any changes in the near future, but it's always a good idea to keep the resume up-to-date so I don't forget things.

My experience, while centered on embedded projects, is fairly wide. I've written boot code that had to be less than 15KB and debugged by logic analyzer, and I've written Windows XP-Embedded code on systems with gigabytes of storage, with hard disks and CD-ROMs. Most of my work has been done on a "hard" real-time OS (RTOS), with symbolic debuggers and various hardware analyzers. Perhaps the most challenging was trying to use a shared Unix platform, with no kernel access, as if it was an RTOS.

On the application front, I've dealt with Windows .Net, a variety of GUI's (X-Window, VB, and home-brew CRT OSDs (on-screen displays). I've dabbled with the complexities of makefiles, designed various drivers in UML using C++ and OOD design patterns to fulfill a published API, and actively managed a Clearcase version control system. Again, see my resume for details & all the buzzwords. Feel free to contact me at this address or rob at neff.net


Personal Life

Born in Montana, I grew up in Northome, Minnesota (or try this link). It's a small town, so small that 2nd Street is the suburbs, the town drunk would park his John Deere by the municipal liquor store, and dogs ran loose in town, including the old half-blind pitbull, but it was okay because we knew all their names. One spring day I even saw a dog sleeping on the center line on Main Street. Many people from moderate-sized places say their school was so small they knew all the names of the kids in their grade. Well, I knew their names, as well as the names of their parents and siblings and often their grandparents. Where they lived, what their parents did for work, and what pets they had. I knew everybody for 3 miles in any direction, and almost everybody within 6 miles.

It's far north in northern Minnesota, International Falls was the county seat. There's about 6 paved roads between us and the North Pole. Think I'm kidding? I know there's 3 paved roads between my house and Canada, 60 miles north, and about another 3 in that part of Ontario.

We actually had a small farm 4 miles outside of town, of about 400 acres. That sounds like a lot now, but it includes swampland and barely-improved forests, so there wasn't that much for the pastures and fields. Our school district consisted of two small schools on either side of the "Big Bog". It was bigger than Rhode Island, but only graduated about 35 kids a year at best.

I went to University of Minnesota, Duluth for college. It's on Lake Superior and a real nice city. One perk is that there is a major ski resort (700 ft drop) inside city limits. Five years of college got me two degrees and a little extra-curricular activity, such as rock climbing to the top of Devil's Tower in Wyoming, and a trip to Louisville, KY with the campus ministry for an Ecumenical gathering where we taught some cute Floridians how to ice-skate (this was before roller-blades were popular), and laughed at their reaction when they saw some tiny little snowflakes drifting down. A trip to Germany to visit my sister and brother-in-law was also enlightening.

After college I got a job near Dallas, Texas - that was a change in both climate and culture. I became certified in Scuba there and had a great trip to rural Mexico. After 20 months I was surprised by being laid off, but a different division of the same company picked me up, this time in a suburb of D.C. in northern Virginia. Before I started there I was able to enjoy a month back home in northern Minnesota, where I rented a trailer house that had no locks - unless you count the simple hook latch used to keep the door from blowing in the wind when vacant - but this latch could only be opened and closed from the outside!

The D.C. area was real nice, with history all around me and always there were events going on and camping nearby in West Virginia. I was able to track some genealogy, ancestors that settled in Maryland in the mid-1600's. My uncle was little more than an hour away and we visited a couple Civil War sites. But becoming disenfranchised with the job in Virginia, I decided to move back home, however I could only find work as close as Chicago. It was halfway, which was better than nothing, so I took that. Started volunteering at a prairie restoration group (CFC) where I was able to get outside and do something good for the environment.

Then I met this wonderful Bulgarian woman, and never got back to Minnesota after all. She had a job lined up in Connecticut, so I went out there with her, we got married and I traveled to Bulgaria, meeting her family and touring the country (deluxe tour takes a week to see the whole country). After a bit, she became pregnant, we moved back to Chicagoland where she has close friends, and we moved into our first house when she was 7 1/2 months along. December 31, 1998 Philip was born and what remained of my hobbies (genealogy, juggling, old Volksies, sci-fi books, etc.) was taken over by him, but I don't mind.

Three years in that house and that was the longest I had been in one place since leaving Minnesota, and for my wife since leaving Bulgaria, so we made a token move, just 12 miles, but to a much bigger and shinier house, a McMansion-lite as I call it. In the first two years, first my wife was laid off, then after starting her own business, I was laid off. Put together we were out of work for about 17 months (of 24), but now that seems to be behind us, and we can look forward again. And that's where we are now.




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