My name is Dane. I was born a while ago on the island of Jamaica (ya mon). Soon my parents moved to Toronto, Canada (with many of the other Chinese-Jamaicans, chi le ma). After that, to Ft. Lauderdale, FL, which mostly where I grew up. I don't remember anything from Jamaica or Toronto really. My parents got naturalized after a while, so I am a Chinese-Jamaican-Canadian-America. Go figure.

In school I was a big geek, and still am. I did very well in school without really trying (after middle school anyway), but knew that if I really wanted an education I needed to get the heck out of Florida. So when I graduated, I applied a number of places, got in all but one, and ended up going to the Georgia Institute of Technology (AKA GeorgiaTech), mostly for financial reasons.

I graduated 3rd in my class at GeorgiaTech with a B.S. in computer science. It was really the "I can't be bothered" major for me. I took a load of engineering classes, didn't really enjoy them so went back to computers. I've been programming since 4th grade elementary school, so it was obscenely easy to get through the CS cirriculum (I probably didn't learn a damn thing new about computers until my senior year).

After graduation, I applied to jobs all over the place (California, Texas, Florida, etc). I had interned with Motorola before and "corporate culture" was a bit annoying so I wasn't really entusiastic about any of them. Then a number of local companies came recruiting and I interviewed with MATRA Systems (which later became Clarity Commerce then OmniCo). Of all the job offers I had, this wasn't the most money but didn't involve wearing suits either, which is a small price to pay in my opinion. So I joined MATRA and worked there for sixteen years. It had its ups and downs, but then it was time to move on and try something new.

So I decided to switch industries altogether and try something outside my comfort zone. So I took a job at athenaHealth. It was a fantastic environment to work in, and the people were great, but looking forward at what my career might become there, it wasn't really exciting me (the technologies I was working in were not my favorite).

And then a golden opportunity sort of fell in my lap: it was an industry I knew, building a team from the ground up, all middle-layer work, with technologies I wanted to work with. So after only 17 months at athena, I returned back to the world of retail and started working for NCR. For a time this was an interesting job working on some newer technologies and with no real pressure except to work on innovations and prortypes. But then management decided to try to push for integration with an older product and try to get bring new things to market without a real plan. The bureaucracy started to weigh on me and the management was not what I was after.

So following a now ex-coworker, twice over, who had followed another ex-coworker, I moved on to Rollins. This is an interesting job, because this is the first time I'm working somewhere where software is not the product. It's simply a necessity to run the business. So, while not particularly interesting from a technology standpoint, this has definitely been a unique and challenege experience.

That's my history in a nutshell. These days I'm mostly just an anti-social person who likes to sit around, watch a little TV (Food Network mostly), cook, read, watch movies, travel, fiddle around with computers, and hang out with friends.

Thanks for visiting,
Dane