Thomas Weiss:
CLASS OF 1974
Crystal River High SchoolClass of 1974
Crystal river, FL
University of Florida - Computer ScienceClass of 1978
Gainesville, FL
Crystal River Middle SchoolClass of 1970
Crystal river, FL
Eagle Elementary SchoolClass of 1966
Zionsville, IN
Kilgour Elementary SchoolClass of 1965
Cincinnati, OH
Thomas's Story
After High school, I went to UF in Gainesville. I wanted to major in everything (know a little about a lot), but this civilization insists that you specialize (know a lot about a little) so I looked for the most general specialty that I could find and settled on computer science.
Yea, I know - I figured that computer science was used in just about any field but to my horror I found my self getting specialized down to COBOl and FORTRAN under the MVS operating system running on IBM 370 mainframe hardware. {{{shudder}}}.
Well, that was squeezing me out of existence - I was pretty good at it, but it was an extremely narrow specialty that had a short life span to boot.
So, Matt Kennedy and I invented the Hypercube Speaker (a high fidelity speaker that made an actual right four dimensional hypercube out of a four dimensional material - sound), dropped out of college, patented the technology (Utility patent 4,231,446) and started a company called Tesserax, Inc.
We got the prototypes tested (the speakers sounded fantastic to us, but then of course they would) to get objective measurements of their performance. We purchased four JBL L40 speaker units and made the prototypes out of two of them and then measured them against the two remaining stock JBLs.
They blew them away in every category by a ridiculously wide margin, so we figured we had a winner.
At first we tried to license the technology and ran into the Not Invented Here barrier - it didn't matter how good the test results were, the acoustic engineers refused to even listen to them since everything they had learned (Thiel air motion equations and such) told them it could never work.
All the math they knew had a three dimensional cubical enclosure as its base assumption and all they knew how to do was plug numbers into prepackaged sets of equations that they had learned in college with no more fundamental understanding than a parrot learning how to mimic human speech. They were incapable of extending those equations up one dimension, but such is life.
I guess you can tell that I lost all respect for acoustic engineers during that little go-round.
Well, licensing the patent was out, so we gamely tried to manufacture them ourselves on a 20K shoestring. Yea, I know, but we had the utter naivete of youth.
First thing that happened was our account executive at our advertising and marketing firm not only absconded with our (and others) advertising budget, but before he got out of dodge with the money he told us that we had an appointment with a major magazine in New York City, who wanted to give us a spread in their magazine.
We all piled into the van with the JBLs and the prototypes and took the long (and expensive) trip to New York City to arrive by the appointed hour. When we got there, magazine's management and staff had no knowledge of our existence. They agreed to accept the prototypes as an unsolicited submission and we drove home feeling like a bunch of beat-up junk-yard dogs.
A month later, they shipped the prototypes back in a highly damaged state (it looked like they had opened them with a crow-bar to see what was inside - they could not believe that there was nothing made of matter in there) and no mention of them ever appeared in the magazine.
We were learning a little about life and a lot about Murphy's Law.
Then an attorney working for an IBM PC add-on card manufacturer wrote us a nasty letter challenging our right to use our trademark (Bragdon's vector diagram of the parallel projection of a four dimensional hypercube). Our attorney shut them up by showing them the trademark registration in FL dated 1977 - three or four years before that company even existed.
That cost us a chunk of change, though - although we could have made their lives truly miserable had we had the requisite capital to invest in attorney and court fees - they used that logo on their printed circuit board masks!
Anyway, the long and short of it (there were miles more water under that bridge, but I'll cut this short out of mercy) was that the shoestring ran out so we had to dissolve the corporation and get jobs.
I learned that it is unwise to start a manufacturing concern without a considerable amount of capital. I also learned that when your company fails, anything you say about it sounds like an excuse - and I hate that.
I went down to Tampa and did system test...Expand for more
ing on PIX networking units for IBM mainframes for awhile.
After that, I came home to Crystal River and worked for a mainframe software company as a mainframe computer operator. I worked my way up from there to International Consultant and finally Software Engineer at that company over the next decade or so.
I did a lot of work all over North America and in other countries overseas, including France, Germany, and Israel.
The company decided to get out of the mainframe business, so I helped port the COBOL CICS code generator over to the PC platform and left to take a job as a programmer with a contract programming firm, contracted to a (very) large data center.
There I worked on Y2K code remediation of Medicare Part B and Medicaid - truly horrific mountains of creaking old COBOL code that had been cobbled together by Government programmers and then torn apart and patched together by lowest bid contract programmers (like me) over and over again since about 1964 - every time the law changed, which was frequently.
We had to crawl through each and every line of it.
I still have nightmares about the Medical Procedures Table and the coldly pragmatic logic used to decide what medical procedures were permissible and appropriate for living, breathing Human beings. Anyone who has seen that code knows in their head, heart, and guts that Government should not be allowed to come within a thousand light years of health care.
My advise - DON'T GET OLD. <grin>
The large data processing firm liked my work and hired me into one of their subsidiaries, a company that does (or at least they did then) 90% of the cell phone roaming charge reconciliation for all of North America.
I got a phone call one day to the effect that my sister (Jordie) had cancer and was starting chemotherapy. Her two children, my nephews (Parker & Ian), were aged two and four at that time, and her husband (Tom Henry) was working long hours to pay for the 20% of the medical expenses that their insurance did not pay. 20% of an ungodly huge number is still a big number.
The company I was with had no positions near the place where my sister and her family resided, so I resigned, cashed in my chips, moved to my sister's town, bought a house (cash on the barrel head), and took a year off to help her with the kids while she spent much of that time suffering the ravages of chemotherapy.
To anyone who has even a shred of disrespect for stay-at-home Moms - TRY IT SOMETIME. Kids that age try to kill their little selves constantly, 24/7. I love those kids, but I have to say that it was the most stressful and challenging year of my life - and that will still be true if I live to be a hundred!
She's fine, by the way - that was during the year 2000 and she is four years beyond the 5 year survival mark at this point - pretty good for Stage IV cancer of the mammary glands.
After that, it was back to work. There was no work in my field in this area (all mainframe data processing was done elsewhere, not here) so I took a job with a customer support company doing inbound telephone customer support for broadband internet clients.
Three or four years later, they closed their call center and outsourced the work to Canada.
I got a job at a power tool manufacturer doing inbound telephone technical support for lathes, metal brakes, drill presses, air compressors and so on. I also processed orders for spare parts.
Due to the arrogantly brazen criminality perpetrated by the International Banking Cartels recently, combined with our Government's utter disregard for our Constitution since 1913, the power tool manufacturer had to declare Voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy (reorganization) on 1/8/2009 when their bank radically changed the terms of their credit line to something ruinous (while that selfsame bank simultaneously sucked down multiple billions of our taxpayer dollars). The trustee laid off half the company (including me) when it was changed to Chapter 11 Liquidation on 1/30/2009.
They are liquidating over the next 60 days or so and are going out of business after that, so a lot of good people are out of a job.
So, that's my story to date, and now I am looking for work along with an exponentially increasing number of others. Who knows? Maybe this is a blessing in disguise. I remain excited about the future; every day brings something new - at least life is not boring!
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