The Caboteria / Main Web / TobyCabot (revision 36)
IM is one more toxic spill that's directing our attention to short-term minor issues at the cost of procrastinating on important tasks that require more than a few minutes of uninterrupted thinking. Any time-management consultant will tell you that the basics of meeting your goals are to prioritize them and spend the most time on the most important problems. To make real progress in creative thinking, problem solving, or other knowledge work, we need to keep out interruptions and set our own agenda. IM, in contrast, lets your agenda be controlled by anybody who has your screen name. - Jakob Nielsen (more CuteQuotes)

Fun book I've just finished reading: High And Mighty by Keith Bradsher. A very scary book about why SUV's kill more people than cars (both the people inside and the people they crash into) and why the auto makers depend on them to stay in business. It's a very scary book that makes me want to run out and buy an armored Crown Victoria. If you drive an SUV please sell it and buy a car.

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

My Christmas list: TobyXmasList2003.

I volunteer some of my free time to the GNU Project. 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 incredibly powerful! If you haven't played around with perl or python 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 wink my spare cycles go to the SETI project. Despite my meager PIII/933, I seem to be doing pretty well. Haven't found any little green men yet, though.

Work

Here's my (stale) resume, my resume in PDF format and an informal 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 consulting software developer specializing in the design and development of large-scale financial systems written in Java, although I've also built ASP/VBScript systems. I work for a Riverton LLC, a boutique "work for hire" development company. We're small enough that the bell curve doesn't apply, and even in these tough times we're having fun and making our numbers. If you need software architecture and/or development expertise then we can probably help you.

Before that I was the CTO of a small software company in Kendall Square called Black Ink Systems. It was a fun place to work; building real-time financial analytics software for communications carriers. My job was to design things, write good code, and in general try to share some of my experience with the development team.

Before Black Ink I was the CTO and co-founder of a software startup called SaltFire which built financial transaction processing infrastructure for communications carriers. Starting a company was a very intense 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 SaltFire I worked for Kenan Systems 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 Lucent 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 GTECH. 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.

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GCS d s+:+ a C++$ UL+ P+ L++ E- W++ N+ o? K- w-- !O M(-) V-- PS+(++) PE Y+
PGP t-- 5? X+ R- tv+>- b+ DI++ D- G e++ h---- r+++ z++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org

mQGiBDuwmqYRBACl9mAeZWKw+8pv6dttZUJ8eoui83Fc8ESpAE0H6AebuEnz0Ibw
cQmOwXmcjmcgMNB2iT7PwfG2GjkNN5ncn0Pfi+rAQskQquu+dlTk+H7Zf4pA7/G4
O8cPtSXJpT9ku9hypqh7jjuep4UY9Znl8bpvFbxEkAdIfwXRK0vCefY7ZwCg9Zo1
tjxpGyLVhbwZY2foY8UjB+ED/3W4tBuc7zIYi/u0SNnC9Z1T3M9vFKiFlNvA2f6h
3OLpdD5EuWmLXakv7v3awYiMv0fcYGjZfnjJdtaIydFXlvzY+n9BXwSxRKT2muze
WxNB7CveY/Oxf3hXNMFlig2slG0eu2qFBwyh44dnNlkKt0mljxHGpc4LwmgR0/2b
k5AHBACkFGbinQf/TFFLhVtXrSKka0g0fry2P4JACESHFRBttrOsuB44RPC6PtOR
16JFZRez61W19tCDCl1t0DCFsqceErADgNHuMUhFX+7+id0Lwl1eD9/buIFZ3zmm
t7C58n5jlLzTE9weHWX4w7euGXxwM00dx6ti6nDZomEryOz4ErQfdG9ieSBjYWJv
dCA8dG9ieUBjYWJvdGVyaWEub3JnPohXBBMRAgAXBQI7sJqmBQsHCgMEAxUDAgMW
AgECF4AACgkQLUiblPK7u1LX3gCfeOc6wYXJg2UxYPzt6DHdkEkO8KcAoIbQfKM5
ZJ3CZ9pmYHbWJ2XihtwUuQENBDuwmqkQBADtp7RJlKpjJ0FS4Yf6dgt7kfQjgR9d
zr2TLeXGq+qUyo0nsjU9p8CoRPSvuQDhyN0O2MUCG7OAkuO1a28IKRP5qjAudUNq
QbKbaK7i4ht6fjE1bI6r/SyZwbS0t0fM3CSKlRbYDYWcErTA79CeiDZdbCclaALI
Uf5dvo6uZYE2fwADBwP8DrD0Qz4O7hM2WmkmjEbkYkjse56DeVgvF8lTamOJb0X7
Q3DlsaEsE+CUhleVHXbnW74v3yg7XLrbWnVOG1P+XjYC8MgUjZDFiKCLZh4ZXS6u
PSb8C8TZMfSBV7w3FgAd+GRcps/Y+Dt2P1unymf77fEBUHlf7dOP/g724nweCSyI
RgQYEQIABgUCO7CaqQAKCRAtSJuU8ru7UtlEAJ41A3mqzqpO9xGvSIC9r8u2zGyF
vACg5aCwLbNYB0znr9hc7YyxCPK0wks=
=wYbJ
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

Edit | Attach | Print version | History: r64 | r38 < r37 < r36 < r35 | Backlinks | Raw View | Raw edit | More topic actions...
Copyright © 2008-2024 by the contributing authors. All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
Ideas, requests, problems regarding The Caboteria? Send feedback