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The old biotech company where I worked decades ago was
primarily Windows based, which is quite sad indeed. Luckily many here at the
university use not only Windows, but also Macs and even desktop Linux.
I definitely prefer the Linux and Mac sides of things myself.
For system programming I still prefer Perl although I have learned a little Python.
For web programming I use
JavaScript and
PHP too,
and prefer the Apache or
nginx
web server. I have written Active Server Pages decades ago too, but I try not to admit it.
Home computer History:
- 1987: 10 MHZ 8088 Clone, 640KB, DOS 3.30, 30 MB Hard Drive,
1200 baud modem (upgraded to a 14.4K that fried, and then a 2400 that didn't)
- 1991: 12 MHZ 80286 Zenith Laptop, Win 3.0, 2MB RAM, 40 MB drive,
2400 baud modem
- 1996: 60 MHZ PowerPC 601 driven Macintosh Performa 6116CD,
40 MB RAM, 700 MB HD, 33.6k modem, 14" Color monitor, Iomega Zip drive and
MacOS 8.5. I was so excited to go up to 33.6 kbps!
- 1998: 233 MHZ PowerMac G3, 64MB RAM, 2GB HD, Yamaha 4x4x8 SCSI CD-RW
(boy is it noisy!), MacOS 8.6 (upgraded!)
- 1999: Dell Inspiron 7500, 450 MHZ Pentium III, WinXP SP2,
256 MB RAM, 25 GB hard
drive, 56K modem, DVD-ROM (my old company paid for it, sold them cheap
after their collapse)
- 2001: 1 GHZ Duron on ASUS A7VL-VM, 256MB PC133 SDRAM, WinXP Pro,
40GB & 12GB hard drives, GeForce4 MX440 graphics card, 56K modem,
from Simplified Computers in Urbana-Champaign, IL. Great
company! (Thanks, Dan!) I got my 20x10x40 CD-RW from Jim Humphrey at
Dimension Computer, a
great low-cost place to buy a PC system or components in St. Louis.
- 2006: Our
business school was unloading a Dell Optiplex GX1p for $10,
so I bought it. I added some more memory, and gave it to one of the
people in the department who needed it for their laboratory.
- 2008: Another Olin purchase, this time for $20 was a small Optiplex
GX150 (1 GHz P-III, 384MB RAM, XP SP2) which had replaced the old
Duron which was making some weird noises after 7 faithful years!
- 2013: I won an
Acer C710 Chromebook from a raffle! I love this little thing. Google stopped allowing it to update itself in 2019 so now I run
CloudReady on it. It won't run Chrome OS Flex so I am stuck on the final version of CloudReady.
- 2014:
The university did purchase a Latitude E7440 for me which is still quite usable (1.9GHz 2C i5-4300U, 16GB DDR3L-1600, 256GB SATA SSD), especially since it is running Linux full-time.
- 2021: We replaced my wife, Penny's, old Lenovo G580 with a new Lenovo IdeaPad 5i for her so I inherited the G580.
I replaced the aging hard drive with a spare tiny SATA SSD I had, installed Lubuntu 24.04 on it, now it is my portable Zoom laptop since my E7440 is setup at my desk as my
"work from home" desktop. I can still Zoom from the 7440 but since the G580 is portable I can set that one up to use anywhere in the house, whereas the 7440 always has the two external monitors, USB hub, keyboard, mouse and external webcam connected.
- 2022: My aging Acer Chromebook kept crashing so I inherited an old ASUS Zenbook UX330UA Ultrabook my son used in college,
and now it has been re-invigorated using
ChromeOS Flex to be a usable system for me. It even has a bash terminal session so I can SSH to our
campus servers.
List of the smaller computers in
my departmental office at the university and the higher end
systems I manage in our
High Performance Computing (HPC) Laboratory
The annoying Windows 10 on my Dell Latitude E7440
crapped out so I am running Ubuntu 24.04 on it now full time as my work from home system, and I use my ASUS Ultrabook as
my "fun" ChromeOS Flex laptop.
Here is my
list of my favorite freeware
for Windows computers.
Where I buy stuff online
My
completely worthless blog
I really don't live in St. Louis City, but actually a few miles away in
St. Louis County in
Richmond Heights in the
Ladue School District.
I am not very interesting really, but my
brothers sure are!
Our old cat, Mr. Punkers,
passed away in March 2022, but his memories continue
on Tik Tok, now with videos of our new cats, Ollie and Hobbit.
Free Church Plays -
Site containing church service play scripts written by my wife, Penny, primarily for children's Christmas programs and pageants.
Some had been performed at our previous church,
Mount Zion United Methodist near Creve Coeur. It also now contains plays by Anna Muhm who previously worked at our current church,
Samuel United Church of Christ in Clayton. You can watch various performances from recent church services on our
FaceBook page.
New Book Study Guides - Sunday School Book Study Guides written by my wife, Penny. First one: "A Gift of Hope" by Danielle Steel
Room Parties Web Site- Site for
craft and game ideas for elementary school room parties compiled by my wife, Penny. She also has a
Gluten Free Recipe Cravings site and a
smaller serving recipe site.
Schools I have attended:
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Suncrest Elementary School, Morgantown, West Virginia
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Suncrest Junior High School, Morgantown, West Virginia (now Suncrest Middle School)
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Morgantown High School, Morgantown, West Virginia - One year
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Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts - Two years - where I graduated
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Cornell University, Ithaca, New York - Bachelor of Sciences in Electrical Engineering,
while there I was a co-op student at
IBM
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Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio - Two classes one summer while at home with the folks
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Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri
I was a graduate research assistant in the CCRC,
and graduated with a Master of Sciences in EE (although now I would probably be in
CSE). I planned on staying to finish my doctorate, but
left to work at the former Monsanto Chesterfield Village location
until they shut down my department (Animal Sciences Research). I then
came back to work at Wash U where I was able to work for two different
departments in three different colleges within the university:
Biology in
Arts & Sciences, and the defunct Institute for Biomedical Computing (IBC)
in both the
School of Engineering and the
School of Medicine
But again I left to work for a biotech
company
who later shut down their entire St. Louis division.
I finally came back to work here at Wash U in
Earth, Environmental & Planetary Sciences and
Arts & Sciences IT running the
EEPS High Performance Computing Laboratory. I will be here until I retire, whenever that happens to be...
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