David Dellinger - About me OCC

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The early years

I was born and raised in Long Beach and Seal Beach. My family has been in California since the 1910's. My brother and I (twins) were (and are) close. I was an Eagle Scout. (So was my brother). When I was a senior at Los Alamitos High School in 1977-78, where among other things, I took a Fortran class on an IBM 1130. The thing had core memory RAM (I think it was a whopping 32K), a card reader, a line printer and a console (an IBM Selectric typewriter!) - and filled a room. It had a removable hard disk the size of a large 12 inch boiling pot. It was either 5 or 10 megabytes. It was fun to learn on. All of the lights would flash when your program executed. When I got to California State University, Long Beach, I decided to major in Math/Computer Science. After 8 years of working (ie. getting burned out) as a Fortran and C programmer and as a UNIX system administrator and User Consultant for Hughes Aircraft ("Huge Aircrash?") in Fullerton, I decided that I needed a change of pace.

Europe

I had been to Europe twice before (1983, 1985), but wanted to see it from a bicycle instead of a train. So in 1988 I travelled there for 3 1/2 months with my bike and loaded panniers (saddle bags). David in Frace I made sure that I would meet people by volunteering for 2 weeks on an organic farm in Norway and 3 weeks in an archeological expedition on a mountain top in France. My French classes at Golden West College, my Norwegian classes at Coastline Community College and my field archeology classes at Cypress College paid off! I was even interviewed for a local TV station in France... in French! What a wonderful change of pace! I was camping and cycling for months without a cubicle in sight! I tell you, it was culture shock coming back to work after that!

The Danish Connection

I met my lovely future wife in Denmark (while cycling there), and after a long distance romance for about a year, we found that it was difficult to be apart. I proposed on the edge of the Grand Canyon when she came over to visit, and she said 'yes' immediately. I couldn't have been happier. I gave Hughes Aircraft 2 weeks notice and moved to Denmark on 5 February 1990 and started work immediately as a programmer for Stantext A/S to write and maintain a level 1 PostScript interpreter written in C on a Unix system. The next year, we re-wrote (and improved) our program to work directly on Macs. I had a Macintosh II with 4 MB RAM and could really feel the difference when I was upgraded to 5 MB. I worked there for 3 years, until the company went bankrupt trying to compete against big-guns like Linotype-Hell and Agfa.

After Stantext, I taught full-time Operating Systems (UNIX), Database, Multi-tasking, Desktop Publishing classes at the Computer School of the Aarhus School of Business. I taught most of my classes in Danish... which was very good after only 3 years there.

The Danish School of Journalism

The last 3 years in Denmark I was the computer manager of The Danish School of Journalism. It was an interesting place to work. They had 250 "Macintosh" computers, 4 PCs and 1 UNIX server. I helped the Radio department 'go digital', by helping put in old Mac IIcx's with special audio cards - now the students could edit on the computer and burn a CD of their work - in 1995.

It took me as much time to administer those 4 Windows PCs as it did a whole slew (between 200 and 250) of Macs. I was back for a visit in June of 2001, and they have lots of new Macs and the whole place is covered with wireless base stations so students can connect from anywhere. Cool stuff.

While I was there, I wrote a system using Frontier that took newswire photographs which were coming off of an ISDN feed (that was high-tech back then!) and published them dynamically on what we called our "Internt" network (Danish for internal)... that was late 1995 and we hadn't heard the term "intranet" yet. That program ran until 2003. I still use Frontier a lot. That's pretty much what I use to create this very website. I now use the version called Radio UserLand Radio, but has all of the features that the old Frontier had, and more. Frontier itlself is an amazing content tool. They both work on Mac OS X.

Denmark is a very nice place. Cold, but nice. Not as cold as North Dakota (or so I've heard... I've never been to that state) must be, but cold for a native Californian. Dannebrog The people are nice and the social safety net is wonderful. Public transportation and bike paths were a wonderful combination. We didn't even own a car the first 4 years that I was there (completely foreign for a native S. Californian), and I can count on just two hands the times I drove to work during my 7 years there. I bicycled to work even in the dead of winter, unless they hadn't cleared the snow off of the bike lanes. I even cross-country skiied to work on some new East German skis when we lived about 2 km. from work. But, alas, Denmark is cold, even in summer (okay, no snow, but I often equated a Danish summer to a S. Californian winter: chance of rain, some sunny days), and after 7 years (to the day) we picked-up stakes and moved to my "homeland".

Intelenet Communications

A good friend of mine, and former roommate while we were both working at Hughes Aircraft, Mark Towfiq, had started an ISP (Internet Service Provider) called Intelenet Communications. He convinced us to move and soon I was back at work in S. California. I did some website design and maintenance, but mostly I worked as a UNIX System Administrator consultant for Road Runner cable modems around the country, which enabled me to travel and see my own country. Then the company was purchased by FirstWorld Communications, which later changed their names to Verado. This was a slow death, but in the end, I decided to get out and work on my own. Soon after I left, the company death-spiraled into bankruptcy.

Later, Mark bought Intelenet Communications back from Verado, and it's now a thriving local hosting company.

On my own for a while

Between May 2001 and June 2003, I worked on several projects. Some paid, others not.

Full time again

At the end of June 2003, I became a full time employee again. This time at HouseHunt, Inc. in Huntington Beach, CA. It's only 5 km to work by bicycle, which suits me just fine! I run the IT Department there, running our PCs and multiple email servers, as well as assist with our 1500+ websites.

My Better Half

Marianne My wife Marianne, a certified translator, has set up her own successful translation agency: WordFlows, LLC. Not only is she a first rate translator and interpreter, she co-ordinates large jobs to/from other European languages. She translated the Danish subtitles for the Director's comments on the Shrek DVD and did the quality control of the translation of all of the Harry Potter Books for Warner Bros. She has also translated the director's comments of The Last Castle and the Danish/French film Christian. I was often called in with my expertise in computers to either do language work (proofreading, mostly) or layout work (You gotta love MS Word ;-)

Marianne has also taught English and has more recently taught ESL at UCI and California State University, Long Beach.

Activities

I have volunteered answering phones at "kcrw", my favorite radio station.
I enjoy to bicycle ride, walk on the beach, camp, hike, swim, photography, tennis and badminton. We enjoy travelling and over many trips have been to such far off places as:
  • Honeymoon - 1990
    • The Maldives
    • Sri Lanka
    • Singapore
    • Bali
    • Hawaii (big island) and volcanic eruption.
  • Asia/Pacific
    • Japan - 1987
    • 2.5 months in S. East Asia and the S. Pacific:
      • Thailand (Phuket, Ko Phi Phi, etc.) - 1997
      • Malaysia (Taman Negera) - 1997
      • Singapore
      • Fiji - 1997
      • The Cook Islands - 1997
  • Europe
    • Denmark (of course) - 1988, 1990-1997, 1999, 2001 (Ja, det er rigtigt, at jeg snakker og skriver dansk)
    • France - 1983, 1985, 1988, 1993 (Oui, c'est vrai que je parles un peut de Français)
    • Germany - 1985, 1988, 1990s
    • Greece - Santorini - 2001 - Nice place!!
    • Italy - 1985, 1995, 1999
    • Norway - 1988, 1995
    • Scotland - 1996
    • Sweden - 1993, 1995 (4 times)
  • North America
    • Canada (mostly British Columbia)
    • Mexico (Baja California)
    • USA (various times)
      • Oregon (latest: June 2002)
      • Washington
      • Nevada
      • Utah (latest: October 2002)
      • Arizona
      • New Mexico
      • Texas
      • Colorado (mostly Denver)
      • Maine (mostly Portland)
      • Tennesee (mostle Memphis and western TN)
      • Kentucky (Clinton, KY in the western tip is where my Great Grandma Lela was from)
      • Florida (from Jacksonville to Key West, and a lot in between)
      • Wyoming
      • Hawaii (Oahu, Hawaii, Maui)
      • Idaho
      • Montana
      • Arkansas (near Memphis)
      • Mississippi (near Memphis)
      • Louisiana (New Orleans)
      • New Jersey
      • New York
      • New Hampshire
      • Virginia
      • Washington D.C.
      • National Parks
        • Yosemite (2002, 2000, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2004)
        • Kings Canyon / Sequoia (1962!, 1970, ... , 1997, 2000, 2004)
        • Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (1992, 1998)
        • Grand Canyon (1967, 1981, ... 1990... 2003)
        • Zion National Park, UT
        • Bryce Canyon National Park, UT
        • Mesa Verde National Monument, CO
        • Canyonlands National Park, UT
        • Capitol Reef National Park, UT
        • Arches National Park, UT
  • Atlantica
    • Iceland - 2001
    • Fuerta Ventura - 1996
    Radio Apple
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