Michael Ferreira:  

Life Hi; It’s been many years since I was in high school. As some of you may know, I dropped out in my senior year.I later earned my GED while serving in Vietnam. I grew up a little bit while I was in the military and decided to go back to school when (and if) I returned from the war. Well apparently I did return. I attended San Jose City College when I returned and received my liberal arts degree in 1975. I then went to San Jose State as a poli sci / history major as a stepping stone on the path to becoming an attorney. I later discovered that practicing law was not my cup of tea. I then moved to Santa Cruz and attended UCSC as a Geology major. Geology didn’t pay well so I returned once again to San Jose State and earned my bachelors in Electronics (1982) . I then continued with my graduate work at Stanford University. I have been working as an electrical engineer / chip designer ever since. I worked as an SDI (Star Wars Programs) designer for ten years and was on design teams for many space missions including the Galileo space probe that was later crashed into Jupiter. I was on the design team for the G4 CPU that powered the old MAC and was on the Centrino design team while employed at Intel. I am presently employed as a designer for the cpu chip that controls the iPod. I taught engineering for a few years for private industry at various schools across the country but mostly at the University of Southern Maine in Portland. I consider Portland to be my second home. For a while I had homes on both coasts as I traveled a great deal between the two. My home on the Pacific Ocean was on Westcliff Drive in Santa Cruz ... the same road that the Boardwalk and Steamer Lane lighthouse are on. The view from my front window was the Monterey Bay. My home in Portland Maine built in 1783 was on the Atlantic Ocean ... Smugglers Cove where the view from my back window was Headlamp lighthouse on Cosco Bay. H.W. Longfellow was best friends with the lighthouse keeper in the l...Expand for more