Aoirthoir

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Anyone is welcome to contact me any time of the day or night. I'm up all hours coding.

Name: Joseph James Frantz
Address: Fairview Park Ohio.
Phone: 440-521-7214
Email: boscagarda-meetup23456d@yahoo.com
Personal Website: http://www.aoirthoir....
Business Website: None
Skype Name: Aoirthoir
Yahoo Messenger: Aoirthoirselect
IRC on Freenode: Aoirthoir
AOL: diajjf
Google: joseph.frantz

My start in computers came years ago with a TI-80 I think. We got it at a flea market. I typed in commands like "hello", "How are you", "I'm Joe" and kept getting messages back like, "Syntax error", "Syntax Error", and "Syntax Error". Clearly this thing did not understand proper English. It did not help that we had no manual. Eventually we got a couple of cartridges for it and I got to play around. Then about 1986, I came back to Ohio and started working with PCs. I even built my own. Nowadays we know that isn't such a big deal. But back then I felt like King PC. I played around with a bunch of different programs but did not think to write software.

Then I started to work at an Electronic Data Interchange company in North Olmstead. They wouldnt hire a high school kid as a sales rep. Something about getting in at 4pm, and the businesses closing at 5pm. So they gave me a chance with the programming. Cobol. This was in 1987. I loved it. So that moved my decisions from hardware to software. From there I started doing some consulting on my own using a variety of programming languages. Went first from the highly structured Cobol to Basic. And endless thoughts of killing myself slowly and painfully. GW-Basic at that! Eventually I landed on Clarion which I still think is a great system. Then somehow I got out of it.

I've done a lot of things since then. Of course I got on the internet as soon as I could. I played around with making websites but never really learned that much. I understood HTML though. Then a handful of years ago, maybe four or five, I decided to try again. Still didnt get anywhere, but I did learn CSS. So from that moment forward, tables were out. My brother in law complained because I had just taught him how to design a site with tables. "First you say do it this way, now that..MAKE UP YOUR MIND...:D". I still did not understand fully the issues of compliance but I had a good understanding that CSS was better.

So from before that until now Ive done things like worked on a hog farm, pulled a stint working for a printer, worked at mcdonalds, temp agencies, newspapers, medical science test subject (I kid you not), gave blood(ok here I am kidding, except when I was a test subject), raked leaves, worked in a mail room (two companies in a row) and then now, finally at the company I am currently employed, I went from the mail room to Database Analyst. That means I talk to databases, find out how they feel about their parents, you know, fun stuff like that. :D

I feel I fell into just the right position. I am pro-FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and my employer (Advanced Medical Support Services) is sold on it as well. Currently I am creating two apps. One, to manage all of our data, to centralize it and all our business processes. The other, is an app to create the app, and others hopefully in the future. In the past year Ive had to learn a lot of the new technology again. Of course I have an inkling to return to Cobol and I probably will, for future stages of this project. But I have a cursory understanding of PHP, and am at best a scripter in it. Not a programmer. I do have a pretty reasonable understanding of MySQL and make very heavy use of triggers, stored procedures and functions. I use cursors when I need to, but as much as possible, I attempt to keep everything to a pure sql statement. In fact the current version of our app, actually outputs html directly from the SQL. The methods I used to do so are not very efficient, but they solved some problems I was having with PHP. The next version will return back to php (since we have a PHP programmer helping us now.). But all of the business logic, the archiving on inserts, updates and deletes, and other such things, are done via stored procs and triggers.

Ok bla bla bla. If I read this I would probably want to stick a needle in my eye:) So I know some of yall are glazing over. I promise to wrap up fast now. Basically I joined this group because I am interested in learning more. All of the ideas about helping charities, giving workshops, and such are definitely very exciting to me. It is more than I had hoped to be involved in and I am very thankful for all of the ideas and assistance from the members.

Anyone can call me anytime. If I am not available, just leave a msg. Ring me on Skype if you want.