Richard Stewart:  

It's been an interesting journey since leaving high school. I spent many years getting over-educated. Two years at El Camino, a BS from UC Davis in Physics, an MS from UC Berkeley (UCB) in Physics, and finally a PhD from UC Davis in Electrical Engineering. Between my MS and PhD, I spent two years teaching Physics and Electrical Engineering (EE) at Santa Rosa Junior College (SRJC). I had been inspired by my El Camino Physics Instructor Tom Wilson to pursue a community college teaching career. But, I got bored at the prospect of doing the same thing over and over again, so I returned to school to get a PhD. Oh, I guess I should mention I married Julie, one of my students at SRJC. She ended up with a similar career path, including a PhD in EE at UCB, but alas, we had more of a student-teacher relationship than anything and the marriage ended when her schooling ended. After I finished my PhD at UCD, I stayed in the academic world, doing postdoctoral work at UCB for about five years while Julie was finishing up her schooling. Between UCB and UCD, I did a lot of teaching to support myself, in addition to research. I clearly still had the teaching bug in me. During this time, Julie and I did one a few very noteworthy things. With very little prep, we ran and completed the San Francisco Marathon in about four hours. It was a great accomplishment and I'll never forget starting the race by running across the Golden Gate Bridge and looking across the Bay to downtown SF. We also were able to take two trips to Italy, which was awesome. If you haven't had a chance to travel abroad, it's definitely something worth doing. I was also very fortunate to get a chance to go to Europe another time just after completing my undergrad work at UCD. That trip included Switzerland, Germany and Austria. At the end of 1994 I got divorced and moved to Madison, WI where I took a postdoctoral position at the University of Wisconsin. I spent 1.5 years there, getting a good taste of cold country. My best memories of Madison are of the long bike rides in the countryside past the pristine dairy farms. While there I was trying to see if I could land a permanent faculty position somewhere at a university. Unfortunately, I had chosen to get my PhD at UCD instead of UCB, which was a strategic mistake. So, after seeing the writing on the wall, I applied for and took a faculty position at another community college, in Cheyenne, WY. I ended up spending three years in Cheyenne. It was great from the perspective of having lots of outdoors activities. I love to hike and bike and run, and hiking in particular is a favorite activity. My brother Glen, who got his PhD in Physics, lives near Boulder, CO and works at the University of Colorado. So, besides some great hikes in Wyoming, Glen and his wife and I took many great hikes in the Rockies. We made it to the top of two 14000 peaks. At the college in Cheyenne I taught Physics, Engineering, Math and an Introductory Computer course. That brings me to computers...I had spent a lot of time programming in FORTRAN while in my PhD program and as a postdoc, so I had pretty good programming skills when I got to Cheyenne, albeit it, all in scientific programming. While in Cheyenne, I discovered programming for business applications. I taught myself Visual Basic, Access, and also taught myself about relational databases. More on this in a moment. While in Cheyenne, I met and married my second wife, Joyce. She had four kids, almost all grown up, so she was ready for an adventure. As I was about geared up to change careers to Information Technology (IT) about the time we married, we jumped on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to life overseas. She took ...Expand for more