Lance Shipman:
CLASS OF 1976
Aviation High SchoolClass of 1976
Redondo beach, CA
California State University Class of 1979
Long beach, CA
Lance's Story
My life in a nutshell....
After receiving my BS in Geology a got a job in west Texas as a mudlogger (a wellsite geologist). Learned that you can work a 24 hour (even 48 hour) shift and a lot about loneliness. Got married (met my wife, Karen, at CSULB) and decided to go grad school just as the economy in west Texas went down the tubes.
Moved to Long Beach and spent the next three years (90 semester units) going to school, worked at a restaurant full time, part time work in a liquor store and managing an apartment. My first son (Lawrence, now 26) was born about half way through this. My parents moved back to Washington. To protect myself from programmers and geophysicists I took a class in FORTRAN and BASIC. Wrote a FORTRAN program on cards (Yuk!). As part of geophysics classes I learned a bit about APL, very handy for gravity modeling. Quit work to work on my thesis. After six months of no work, I ran out of money and started looking for a job.
Went to work in Redlands at AIS, a small photo interpretation company. Moved the family to Redlands, the hour and a half drive each way was killing me. The move and job was death for my thesis. Somewhere around the house I have a 5.25 DSDD floppy containing a WordStar copy of the first draft of my thesis. I started working at night at ESRI to process the data that we were creating at AIS. After about 10 months the work ran out at AIS and they arranged a job interview at ESRI.
ESRI pioneered the vector GIS market and has been the industry leader for many years. Starting as a data processor I quickly when on to applications programming when they found out I had a flair for programming. I started out working on the data that I had created at AIS and helped site missiles for the US Airforce. When to southeastern Alaska four times working on projects for the US Forest Service. Worked on several small projects for Oil companies. My wife and I had our second child (Hershel, now 21). Presented the results of an oil and gas software c...Expand for more
ompetition at the NCGIA conference in front of 500 people, hardest presentation I've ever given except to a foreign audience. Worked for a year on a project for the DMA on the Digital Chart of the World, a digital 1 million scale map of the world (4 CD's), as the lead programmer/designer. Wrote a program for the DIA to help in the search for SCUD missiles. Between the DMA, DIA and a Dep. of Justice project I went to Washington DC. 15 times that year. My parents moved to South Africa to work on a helicopter. While they were there my family and I few down a spent three weeks touring South Africa. We got the chance to go on a photo Safari, to Cape Town, and Kimberly. Spent the next year traveling internationally, first to Paris for a month, two weeks in Hong Kong, and finally three and one half months in Jakarta, Indonesia. During the work in Indonesia I got to visit with my parents, where they were then working. After returning from Indonesia, I decided that my family was growing up without me and that I had to restrict my travel. I switched divisions and worked doing software support for a year and then moved to where I am now, Products and Development.
My parents retired Greenville, Texas. My Mother passed away in 2001 with lung cancer. My Father passed in 2008 after having a bypass. Much of 2008 was spent closing out my father's affairs (probate court, selling his house in Texas, etc.). I had unfortunately let my weight creep up and in July, while on vacation in Seattle, had a heart attack. They angioplastied out one of my arteries and inserted a stint. I've been exercising 5 days a week and eating healthy ever since. I've lost 130 lbs so far (12 pants sizes). I had an echo cardiogram in 2009 and things a looking good. No damage!
I have two children, both boys (well, men). The oldest, Lawrence (26), is an artist. The youngest, Hershel (21), is a musician, and is just finishing his fourth year at Cal State University, Fullerton as a performance major (Saxophone).
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