Timothy E. Attwood
540 Golson Road S.E.
Olympia, WA 98513-9623
(360) 456-6581
For a number of years now I've been seeking gainful employment in the computer industry. Of course all this free time has given me plenty of time to persue my interest in graphics and art in general. As an artist I am mostly self taught, having spent many hours drawing in pencil and chalk, and countless hours creating 3D models.
I also am a programmer by training; I graduated from Saint Martin's College in 1991 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Software Engineering. Back then, and from time to time since, I've dedicated long stretches of time to coding some nifty utility, or some neato game, but somehow it never has made me much money.
Back in 1986 I recieved an Associate of Science degree from Pierce College in Electronic Engineering and in 1987 I was persuing an electical engineering degree when I switched majors. It was a tough time then, I had married (much too young in retrospect) and divorced that year; after about a year.
Back then I had a Commodore 64 and wrote many programs for it; unfortunatly that turned out to be a dead platform. Now I have a 486/66 which is somewhat outdated but still massively supported. I would sugest that any Macintosh owners go ahead and switch to IBM compatibles as soon as they can afford it, Macs are cool, Macs are great, Macs are probably better than IBMs, but they are a dead end. As with any dead ends in computing there will be a day when what you want to run just won't be available for a Mac. The first computer I can remember is a TRS 80 that was in the window of the radio shack at the mall, the salesmen were nice and let me type on it, but there was no manual... it was off in the box somewhere. I can remember being confused by my first SYNTAX ERROR and the elation of figuring out that CLS would clear the screen.
Since then I have learned quite a few programming languages: C, C++, COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, BASIC, Assembly, Pilot, Forth, DYL 260, SmallTalk, Lisp, JCL, LOGO, and others I've probably forgotten all about. It really is amazing the number of ways that computer languages have evolved. Currently I'm looking into JAVA, which has evolved from OAK, or at least has a snappy name change.
I've worked as a library assistant, which was great because I love to read (after work). I usually read a few books a week; I just got done reading Executive Orders by Tom Clancy. I have read nearly all the SciFi at my local library. Unlike some readers, I prefer to only read a book once; half the fun is in not knowing the ending. I have started to write my own novel, but somehow it is still only about 10 pages long.
Some of my skills include: creating graphics, programming, performing analysis, creating design documentation, learning new programming languages quickly, repairing electronics, repairing cars, commercial fishing, duck hunting.
I live at home; that is, I live with my mother, which some people would criticize, being as I am in my 30's, but really it is quite beautiful here. I live on the Nisqually River, and even the 500 year man-made floods of '96 failed to get the house as it is on a bit of a hill, but it did make a mess in the yard. We were evacuated after the fact almost, as the bridge upstream had become unstable, so along with the neighbors we rode off in a helicopter. The cause of the flood is fairly well known locally, but Tacoma City Light would like to have people think it was a natural disaster instead of their incompetence, because of the potential for lawsuits. What happened was that during the 3 day rainstorm (which was worse than the usual 2 day rainstorm), Alder Dam filled Alder Lake during the first two days and released the entire lake in 12 hours during the third day. The stream flow on day one and two was very low (for all the rain), and then came the big surge on the last day. The way it came about was this, as Alder Lake reached the full mark the engineers decided that they needed to release more water so they opened the flood gates, figuring they would lower the lake a ways and then close the gate a bit... only the control room for the upper dam is in the lower dam (there are two dams in close proximity), and they had released the flood gate enough to flood the control room they were standing in. Of course this meant that they had to evacuate, being as billions of Watts of electricity and standing water mix poorly! So there goes all the lake water on top of what was already getting to be a fair sized flood, and no one in control of the dam while the lake runs dry. Not long after that the power was turned off for a week, which was annoying as my house was dry, but many of the neighbors were wet. One of my neighbors had his place (we're talking mobile homes here) sitting at maybe 16 feet above sea level, mine is about 24, and he had just remodeled from a previous flood that got his place wet. Anyway he's living with his new wife in Canada, I think. Not too long after that (the fist small flood) we adopted a stray cat we've named Skeezix, she has really long hair, and had ran off from somewhere because of all the water. Anyway we've made her a permanent outside cat because of all the fleas, we've tried Program and powders and the foam stuff and nothing would work. She seems perty happy just to look in the sliding glass door; she doesn't even come in when I leave the door open for her.
Well that's enough about me. Maybe you will send me some E-mail about yourself?
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