Armin Kastner:  

I married Heidi Trieslemann while I was still going to the University of Waterloo. This past August (2023) we celebrated 55 years of marriage along with our two children and 8 grandchildren. When I graduated I accepted a job in the IT department with the headquarters of Fisher Bearing in Germany, Heidi and I both speak German so it was great opportunity. Heidi worked in export sales for the same company and also taught English for engineers at the Schweinfurt campus of the University of Würzburg. It was while we were in Germany that our son was born. Within a year of our son's birthday, we came back to Canada. I had accepted a job with the University of Waterloo but joined Revenue Canada, Customs and Excise in Ottawa shortly after that. Heidi finished her degree at Carleton University during this time. We adopted our daughter a few years after arriving in Ottawa. I quit Customs and Excise after five years and accepted a job offer with British Columbia System Corporation in Victoria. We stayed there for three years and Heidi taught at an Indian and Northern Affairs school during this time. After the three years at BC Systems Corp. I accepted a job offer from Revenue Canada, Customs and Excise (yes, they wanted me back) and we moved back to Ottawa. Heidi was able to get a job at Indian and Northern Affairs headquarters as a policy analyst. I had many fantastic opportunities at Customs and Excise including the design and implementation of the Free Trade Agreement database and then the design and implementation of the GST database. Google my name and DB2 and you will find the preface of a book that one of my guys wrote that mentions me. For those of you who don't know, a database is like the foundation of a building. If it is determined that the foundation isn’t right once construction starts, it gets very expensive to fix it, not to mention delays. In the case of database, all the code that is written depends on the database. It is also expensive to fix it resulting in delays and poor system performance. I had been presenting papers at computer conferences throughout the US but in 1993 one of my papers was selected for an international computer conference in Geneva and Revenue Canada, Customs and Excise sent me. I remember seeing the signature sign off on my documents, it was Otto Jelinek, the Minister of Revenue Canada at the time himself. It went that far up the chain of command. Two years after becoming a director of Data Management at Customs and Excise I quit the government to become an independent consultant. This involved many contracts out of the country including San Juan Puerto Rico, London, England, Beijing and Wu Han, China (with the International Monetary Fund), Los Angeles, Columbus, Ohio, etc. While in China I spent and afternoon walking along the Great Wall of China. While in London I had a wonderful apartment off Sloane Square in Chelsea. I remember getting off the subw...Expand for more