My Life
At some point I may add my LifeCoreDump, but for now, the current affairs:
I live in Oregon. Mapquest says
this
link will take you to a map of how to get to where I live, but I
won't promise it works.
This is my house nowadays. Actually, it's
my house as of 1996 winter, when it was SNOWY in an otherwise bland and rainy
climate. Since then we've removed two trees, had a new roof put on the house,
and begun repairs on the stairs.
Until January 23d of 1998 I worked for
Intel Corporation, in the High End Servers
Division. I got away at a fairly good time, considering the way that the
fortune cookie crumbled the next week with the division being heavily
reorganized and the expensive and mandatory relocation to Dupont, Washington
suddenly falling apart as the costs of the Dupont plant became visible to the
board of directors. In retrospect, I wish I'd been able to transfer to some
other part of Intel rather than spending 2 years doing work I wasn't trained
for and getting none of my requested training.
I worked for several months doing Perl code/analysis at a nice company which
does telephone cards ... they were fun, and I like the folks, but when a company
has been purchased by WorldCom and they merge with MCI all sorts of strange
stuff falls out. I just hope all are doing well now. I contracted there thru
the auspices of
the Maxim Group, a contracting
services company in Beaverton, Oregon. They're a subsidiary of Aerotek,
which you can reach off their page.
I then went to work in October of 1998 working for NEC doing test automation
for an
embedded software product, via Aerotek. I changed to fulltime employee in
January 1999 as part of the conversion of contract people to fulltime people,
which
was a process required by the transformation of the group from a subsidiary
to a separate company called
eLuminant, which you can tell as much
about from the webpage as anyone else. That is... if it's still there.
NEC Eluminant made embedded switching equipment used by telephone companies to
package all these lovely digital signals into tiny wires.
It was a fun job but after Intel I was a lot more cynical and cautious about
companies, but also I learned a lot about how to get things done and how not to
do things, which was tremendously helpful there.
Nevertheless, because of the burst in the bubble, NEC Eluminant started the
death of a thousand cuts, and I went in the second cut. 25 of 250 employees
were let go on April 13, 2001. Good timing that. Two days before taxes were
due. Also it was the wednesday of Holy Week - just four days before Easter.
September 2001, jobs were beginning to appear sporadically, and there was a
hint that things might be picking up. I'd had an interview at Intel for a
software testing contract but the job evaporated when just before the guy
called to offer me the position, a major cutback was announced and they laid
off 250 people. Naturally new contracts were put on hold.
As temporary survival work, I went to
Norm Thompson Outfitters and worked
on their telephone sales team, for a few months. Exhausting but fun. Catalog
sales do not call people, so anyone who you talk with wants to talk to you,
and they're actively interested in getting something neat, generally as a gift
for a friend or family. I did this in 2001 and again (as a customer service
representative) in 2002, for their 'Peak Season'.
In 2001, my wife Penny was put on insulin. In July of 2001, she was diagnosed
with endometrial cancer. That's cancer of the lining of the uterus, and is
one of the most survivable cancers. Her treatment was very hard: They removed
the uterus, but not the ovaries. Her weight (increased thanks to the insulin)
and her asthma prevented them doing more, so after she had healed up somewhat
they sent her to a local cancer treatment unit for radiation treatments.
It took her a year and a half to recover from this to the point where she
had the ability to do much of anything. The day after her last internal
radiation treatment, which was Dec. 22nd, she was hoping to go to church for
Christmas services. No way. It was like they cut her strings. She could barely
walk to the bathroom for two weeks.
While the cancer is gone, so is the cartilege in her knees, never very good
to begin with since an untreated accident in high school. Gotta love the
mother who would rather think her kid was faking it, than actually pay out any
money (even though it was covered by insurance.) Had she been treated when the
damage was first done, she would not have this problem now. And of course the
good people at Kaiser Permanente will not do anything to help, thanks to the
beancounter approach to medicine.
In 2003, I began a part-time contract with Software Smith (a company owned by a
friend of mine) working on online catalog and doing some programming for the
IT department at Dave Smith Motors in Idaho. That ended in January except for
a few more hours of cleanup work recently.
So what does one do after four years of unemployment? At the very least, Vote for Kerry.
I'm a member of the
Episcopal Church,
more precisely of
St. Bartholemew's Episcopal Church,
in the
Episcopal Diocese of Oregon.,
which oddly enough only encompasses western Oregon.
In response to a prayer for a 'better spiritual life' I found myself wheedled,
cajoled, compelled, lured, and otherwise drawn into more active involvement at
St. Bart's, including taking the three year 'Bethel' course with my wife,
becoming an usher, a greeter, and even a "Stephen Minister" -- which is a
wonderful program developed by a Lutheran psychiatrist who noted that his
pastor was completely overextended to the point that he couldn't do most of
his job. He identified those parts of pastoral care and counseling which
could be handled more effectively by lay members, and a VERY Intense program
for training the lay members and for supervising them.
Other pursuits...
I used to spend too much time on the Net writing stories. Alas, I have not
been writing much lately, for no valid reason. I've been handling the archives
for the largely defunct "alt.pub.dragons-inn" group, but just as I was about
to think it was gone, some new folks have started writing there, so I'll be
implementing the archive handling off a website Real Soon (i.e. in my copious
spare time).
I used to hang out on IRC but I've given it up as just too annoying.
I also hang out on several mucks, no longer including
Furtoonia (possible dead link) and
Twilight.
For a while I played on Marvel Extreme which was a superhero roleplay mux using Marvel canon up until they
went really stupid around 1988. However, they decided to reboot, setting the
new cutoff around 2000, and are now "The Marvel Universe" and after a good
solid beginning, they've dropped drastically. One does not go out of one's way
to build a good group of staffers and then alienate them.
More recently I've played on Crucible City, a game using the Mutants and
Masterminds game system by Green Ronin. It's been fun in general, but I'm
becoming disenchanted after a year, for reasons mostly to do with my life
and energy levels. It's at crucible.mushpark.com 4626 if you want to take a
look.
My other main online addiction currently is City of Heroes ... the MMORPG version of the entertainment I'd been engaging in. Tremendously fun. Utterly unlike the usual grind of MMORPGs.
I am owned by four cats
{over here}
and one human. The cats
have barely tolerated me in exchange for food for the last several years. The
human (see below) has more than tolerated me since we were married in 1981.
My wife Penny is also on the net,
penny@agora.rdrop.com
-- she's an artist. She also writes. In fact, the only thing she doesn't
do, usually better than I do, is program computers and throw frizbees. When
she gets her own web page set up I'll put pointers here but for now I can
only gush about her in text format.
Back
Stephen Hutchison, June 21, 1995
Updated: Sept 25, 2004