and I have a in fact, I'll back up a little bit. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I appreciate you asking me for this, but, uh, and to explain how I got to where I'm at today. In my career, when I was a child, I was very, very interested in electron ICS, and I used to take things apart. And but much to the frustration of my dad, who was going through Elektronik school at the time, and so he had a radio that he was building, and I was probably eight or nine years old, and they took it all apart. And so before you could beat me within an inch of my life, I managed to put it all back together and had it working. And he was curious. He says, Well, how did you do that? Night civil? I follow these instructions here. This is what? Do you understand how it works? And I said no. But I would point to a component. And I knew what it was because I was curious about what's a capacitor, you know, what's a resistor do and those kind of things And this is back before the Internet. So all we had was encyclopedia is and libraries to go to to learn these things. So I had this crazy curiosity for all kinds of things that were Elektronik and video games were just in there in their infancy then, so they were basic basic machines. The play pong. Or they could play hockey and just put objects on the screen. Well, everybody brought their stuff to me to fix because I knew how to fix all this stuff. So as a kid, I was always curious about electrons and how they worked. So when I get into school in high school, my algebra teacher, because I was so good at math, I worked out a deal with him that if he let me skip school, skip his classes during the week, he would give me the answer or give me the test to take on Thursday. And now it come in on Friday, take the test and just whipped through the tests as long as I could stay in the computer lab during the week and fix all the broken computers for him. So we had back then Apple to ease, and I used to repair all the apple twos for him. And so I took like, 16 bad machines, made eight good ones out of all the parts and then eventually got him all running except for two. And so I was only, uh, 17 at the time, 16 or 17. So then I decided I wanted to join the military and go into the Navy because they had electronic school that I was very interested in. But there was a two year wait and a time in the eighties. Electron ICS, Of course. We're big computers and things we knew. That's where the future waas. So my recruiter asked me if I wanted to go in early and become a flight simulator technician. We're seemed awfully interesting to me because I thought it would be a lot of fun, and it waas eso I got to work on a lot of cool stuff in the military. And then while I was in, I put myself through college while I was in school. So instead of going to a traditional college, I went I went to, um you know, ah, local colleges. I went to an in Virginia Beach and did some of my studies there my primary studies for English and maths and all the basic requirements. But all my advanced studies, I either did online or remote studies and, uh, found that to be more suitable for being in the military. And so when I got out of the military, I still stayed engaged in a lot of electron ICS and things. So I've worked on flight simulators. I've worked on tank simulators, so I kind of stayed within that framework. So currently, I'm I'm a senior engineer on a simulation project for the U. S. Army and I've been in and out of the military environment a few times. And, um, I think a lot of those experiences that I had as a child because my dad was an ex Marine and the exposure to electron ICS spurred my interest because I I stay involved in a lot of electron ICS, and I'll give you, for example, of one of the guys I work with is a big audio freak. So he likes records and old fashioned amplifiers that have to They have tubes in them. Well, there's not a whole lot of people that know how to work on those tube types of equipment anymore. So he asked me, a favorite said, Can you work on this thing that I've gotten? And I says, Well, I'm a bit rusty and I don't wanna let the smoke out of it So I said, But I will help you and uh so I still have that desire. I even stay current cause I have some projects I'm working on with Raspberry pi. If you're familiar, address very pi devices. So I find that stuff fun. So I think that's what really inspired me was when I was a kid through the help of my dad, you know, staying involved because he's that way as well. He's in his mid to late seventies now, and he's still he programs and Python. Yeah, yeah, so it's It's it's a family thing. Yeah, so it helps when you have support of your family, right? And I think that's what helped me in my career.

the responsibilities in the I. T. C. I was the head of I t operations, and so I ran their office 3 65 environment. And it was nice because we had the E five edition of office 3 65 So you get to do all of the policies, all of the creation of accounts for people, and you also get to manage all of the security. And it's nice because the interface is all very user friendly for administrative tasks, and it makes makes life a lot easier. You know, it's a lot different than back in the day when you had to do things manually. But now, with office 3 65 you can get into an interface and just check off boxes and type a few things to get things done quickly. And it was nice. So I not only did the management of us 3 65 but they are I s 0 9000 compliant. So I help them with that certification. And they also did their CMM I Level three certification, which is for quality, And I helped write all of those policies for the I T and security infrastructureIt's regular working hours, regular 40 hours a week. Um, it all depends, right? If you're in I t infrastructure, you have to accept the fact that sometimes you might have to stay a bit late or you might have to do maintenance after hours. So luckily in an office 3 65 environment, you can work remotely and it doesn't matter. You could do most of your management tasks from anywhere. And in fact, we had a project where we actually travelled to Belgium to do a site survey for a project for the Special Forces off NATO. They haven't met. They have medical operations that they do where they wanted to set up a training simulator. So we went over there on travel. And while I was on travel, I was still able to do my job and manage the office 3 65 things, even though with the our def hours of difference and still perforce mother duties doing a site survey to evaluate, what are we going to install? You know, how many switches do we need? How many routers that we need that kind of thing and still be able to handle calls off? Oh, I forgot my password. Oh, my email stuff. Can you figure out what the problem is for me? Yes. So that's That was nice. That was very nice. Yes.

Some of the biggest challenges, especially in technology, is for people to understand how complicated it can be right? And I think my role is a is a senior I t person is to make that easy to understand because some people think it's is easy as flipping the switch on the lights come on. And they don't realize all of the technical things involved with making that magic happen, right? So that's that's That's the challenge is making it easy for people to understand, because some of this stuff is it's very geeky, you know, it's very is we as technologists make things too hard sometimes for people to understand. And I think it's my job to make a easier for people do, and it helps them get their job done because every every role is important. Even Justus, your role is important, and so you help them get their job done by helping them understand the parts and pieces cause sometimes they don't want to be involved in trying to fix their own problems, right, So if you explain to them what it is that you're doing, sometimes they appreciate it. People appreciate it more when you say Here's the difficulty involved in me solving this for you and especially if it's something really complicated and you might not be able to solve that problem right away. It makes it easier if you say, Hey, I might have to take a couple extra steps to solve this. Yeah.I agree with you Sometimes for us technical types, it's easy for us. We take it for granted because we do the technical things all the time. But somebody that's not involved in that it goes your way over their head and like, Oh, my thesis, this is tough.