Born: October 2, 1936
Phone: 612-729-4189
Email: willy@dreamagic.com
Married: April 1976 - My wife and I share fifteen children (some from previous marriages), 35 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Education:
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While the summary above certainly lists all my major accomplishments, it hardly tells the whole story. For example, I worked more than full time while attending school in order to support the large number of children. There were three when I received my bachelors degree, seven when I quit graduate school the first time. All are now successful adults with families of their own.
I have been working out of my home (as a computer consultant) since 1977. I have been using the Internet since December, 1969, one month after its inception as ARPANET (teleprocessing simulations and data crunching from Oregon Research Institute and the University of Oregon). Our peak traffic reached three million hits per month when Roger Davidson was the Teen Movie Critic (featured in People magazine and by Netscape as well as many other places) and is currently running about a half million per month.
I found it difficult after 1996 getting new contracts although prior to that time almost all my contracts were obtained by word-of-mouth. Indeed, since I specialized in fixing "broken" software projects, my services were in great demand. However, the software landscape began to change in the late 90's, with fewer corporations attempting to produce their own software, plus I discovered that the Computer Science profession is very ageist. This led me to restart my teaching career (at Augsberg College) and to re-enroll in graduate school Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota in 2002, majoring in Computer Science.Completely self taught before then...there were no Computer Science courses the first time I attended...I found graduate school rather difficult this time around since my aged mind is not very good at cramming facts and figures. I also discovered that I am no longer among the fastest programmers on the planet...I have written or supervised the writing of nearly two million lines of code in almost every computer language ever invented...but I could still manage to successfully complete all projects assigned with A and B grades. Unable to qualify for the prelim exams (GPA only 3.0), I quit in 2007.
Now I am seeking half-time work out of my home office where we have four networked state-of-the-art computers. Since all our fifteen children are adults, we no longer need a large income, so I am willing to work for much lower wages at this time. My talents are best employed in innovative software projects, but I have well-honed managerial skills and am a skilled writer as well. All offers will be considered.