TobyCabot - Main - The Caboteria

As a test I'll make a NewPage.

<blockquote>  Don't flinch, don't foul, and hit the line hard. - T.R. <small>(more CuteQuotes)</small></blockquote>

Technology book I'm reading now: Fowler, Martin; _UML Distilled Second Edition_ - the UML is a de facto standard way of describing computer software using pictures.  It's a product of a branch of the industry that I despise (the CASE/process/methods/CMM whiners) but let's face it, there is no common language for describing software and this is pretty good.

Fun book I'm reading now: Joseph Ellis, _Founding Brothers_.  Pulitzer prize winner by a local author: a series of six vignettes each of which describes one crucial moment in the early history of this country, and the people who were involved in it.  I'm through the first chapter, about the "interview" between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, and it was fascinating.  Highly recommended.

It's fun to search for your name on the Web.  Tim Berners-Lee calls this "vanity
 surfing." TobyVanitySurf

My Christmas list: TobyXmasList2001.

I volunteer some of my free time to the GNU Project ( http://www.gnu.org ).  I'm a Volunteer Coordinator, which means that I try to help people who are helping the GNU project.  If you don't know about Free Software I'd strongly recommend that you check out their web site.  I don't have a lot of time to give them, but I'm glad to help.

Given that I've had a little time on my hands I've been playing around with
application development technologies.  The combination
of databases, scripting languages, and Web user interfaces is 
<em>incredibly</em> powerful!  If you haven't played around with 
<a href="http://www.perl.com">perl</a> or <a href="http://www.python.org">python</a>
then you owe it to yourself to find the time to do so.

I've decided that my days of playing LP records are just about over.
OTOH, I've got lots of cool (and not so cool) music on LpRecords.  I'm currently at the
point where I can play my records from work, which is fun.  If only there
were cheap broadband wireless...

When I'm not using the computer (and for most of the CPU time when I am ;)
my spare cycles go to the
<a HREF="http://iosef.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?email=toby.cabot%40pobox.com&cmd=user_stats_new">SETI</a> project.
Despite my meager PII/450, I seem to be doing pretty well. _shhh... don't tell but my work machine is also crunching away (at night anyway)_

*Work*

Here's my <A HREF="/~tobyc/resume.html">resume</A> (courtesy of 
<A HREF="http://www.pennpronet.com/">Pronet</A>), 
and an <A HREF="/wiki/bin/view/Main/InformalResume">informal</A> resume (actually an email that I
wrote to a friend).  Note to recruiters: the online copy of my resume at this site is authoritative.  Please do *not* ask me to send you a copy in Word format.

At work I'm a development director at a small software company in Kendall Square called Black Ink Systems ( http://www.blackinksystems.com/ ).  It's a fun place to work; we're building real-time financial analytics software for communications carriers.  It's a small high-octane team, and the product that we're building is different and interesting.    It's basically a "magic mirror" that shows people what their network is doing from a financial perspective, i.e. revenues, costs, margins, etc.  If we're successful then people will be able to manage their networks as if they were a portfolio of financial instruments.  My job is to design things, write good code, and in general try to share some of my experience with the development team (who are very bright but pretty junior).

Before Black Ink I was the CTO and co-founder of a software startup called <nop>SaltFire which built
financial transaction processing infrastructure for communications carriers.  Starting a company was a very interesting experience and while the company wasn't successful I'm glad that I took the leap.  I learned a lot and met some very cool people.

Before <nop>SaltFire I worked for 
<a href="http://www.kenan.com/">Kenan Systems</a>
as a director in the software development group, at various times
in charge of architecture,
development, and performance groups. We were a cool little
 independent software
company until the founder got greedy and sold out to
<a href="http://www.lucent.com/">Lucent</a>
in early '99.  "Welcome to the Bell System, employee number 156,892.
Please see the nurse for your implant."  Working for the phone company (or at least one of the fragments of it) was interesting but it reinforced my belief that small companies are where it's at.  Given that there's really no better job security at a place like Lucent than at a startup there's not a lot to recommend working there.

Before that I lived in Rhode Island and worked for <a href="http://www.gtech.com/">GTECH</a>.  The technology
is interesting and the people are _great_ but after the founders left
there were too many DilbertStories, so I moved back home
to Boston.

If you have comments or suggestions, please email me at toby@caboteria.org.  I love to get non-SPAM email.

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