Daniel J. Dick

So, what do I do? Well, I am an IT guy.

What kind?  People manager, director, project manager, Unix, Linux, Oracle, networking, PeopleSoft, CMS, PHP, integration, security, systems architect, software architect, performance troubleshooter, data detangler, professional technical support, quality, ISO 9000, HIPAA, SOX, semi-ITIL kind of guy.

I often architect and implement migration paths from helter-skelter to a durable and lasting form of sanity while debugging, untangling, and resolving issues while production continues.  I have a love-hate relationship with things that are broken or done incorrectly.  I think what I love is the transition from disorder, wreckage, sub-optimal operations and such to a perfectly fine tuned environment.  Then I hand off the orderly results to others who are better at maintaining an environment that  has been brought into stability and robustness.

I’m sort of an IT geek’s equivalent of a turn-around CEO.  I tend to analyze, see patterns, innovate, architect migration paths, make sure they’re proven and if possible reversable, and then apply the changes under pressing deadlines with people calling for reports never specified or created.

One would think I would have had a heart attack or would have suffered from carpal-tunnel syndrome long ago, but the doctor says I have a strong heart, and after over 30 years of rigorous, high paced IT work, my hands and arms are doing great as they always have.

Another thing I am is a mentor.  I like to see people and companies succeed.  I think in terms of dreams or visions broken down or decomposed into components or goals.  I see roadblocks as a normal part of a vision or a part of a battle that is prerequisite to and opportunity for victory.  I believe big victories are created by vision and planning and scheduling and celebration of smaller victories along the way to draw attention and increase faith that the big victory is within reach.  These kind of motivators are always needed for big dreams to be realized.  And it works.

Why am I doing this web site?

I am doing this for the benefit of any potential future employer in the bay area near San Ramon.  I love my current job working for US Script and have great management and coworkers, but I only intended to stay with this job for six months to a year to take care of some family needs in the Fresno area.  But, I have a daughter in high school in San Ramon and I need to get back to my normal salary level I had been making in the bay area.

When commercial pharmacy benefits management company US Script was acquired by Centene, US Script inherited several Medicaid health plans.  It took previous programmers approximately three months to burn out trying to create pharmacy encounter programs which would successfully comply with contractual and legal requirements for several health plans.

When I came on board, these programs were prototypes frantically created and thrown into production prematurely out of desperation.  The programmers and US Script management did about as good of a job as possible under the circumstances.  The flow of reporting of claims to the state was successfully begun.  But, there were holes in the data and corrections to be made. Mechanisms had to be built to scan response files and error reports and to coordinate fixes, adjustments, and reversals.  There were often disconnects between the IDs we were required to accept from the pharmacies and those we were required to deliver to the health plans, and much work went into creating programs with enough intelligence to acquire the missing information precisely and report on that information that could not be obtained.  Several health plans had tens or hundreds of thousands of claims not yet reported to the state and deadlines for reporting them.  People said it was like flying a plane while building it, or like jumping out of a plane and building the parachute on the way down.

Having begun to taste some success against all odds, we were then asked to jump out of the plane and build 8 more parachutes and a parachute factory on the next jump.  But, we’re doing it, and apparently we’re doing it well.  As a team.  Working together, and almost winning, hoping to win, expecting to win together.

Michelle's Silly Daddy

At Clickmarks, as Chief Systems Architect and Director of IT and Operations, I built the IT department and helped build and manage the Support and QA departments while they were in their initial phases of growth.  There, I played a substantial role in debugging severe problems with performance and security in the internal and external networks.  I was very proud of our company and management who succeeded in getting this company to prosper and survive through the dot.com crisis, off-shoring, and a recession to the point where it was desired and aquired by a larger company.

At Oracle, I was one of the early members of the Enterprise Systems Center — a team of world class Unix and database experts focused on applied research into performance and scalability for extraordinarily large database systems.  We detangled very sticky performance problems at the Database level, Systems level, Storage level, Network level, whatever the problem was.  In a sense, we were doing extreme black-box testing to where we captured and parameterized SQL traffic and turned black-box testing into white-box testing.

At Ingres, the Direct User Support and Education Departments tangled up 80 database installations on 40 different Unix and VMS platforms, and occasionally tangled up their own workstations, and I detangled them with a smile, or a scowl, or a snicker depending on what was appropriate.  I was too young to be professional at the time

At NASA Ames Research Center, working as a contractor for Recom Technologies, I served as a Systems Manager initially developing a project plan to migrate the Information Sciences Division from a VMS environment to a Unix environment.

Prior to this, I served as the one and only technical staff member when the Computer Science Department started at C.S.U., Fresno installing, configuring Unix systems, PC’s, Macs, video projectors, and maintaining them.  And, prior to that, I was mostly a software developer developing engineering programs with complex mathematics, business accounting software, and in the mid-late 1970’s I worked with Bill Pardini to develop the first vehicle sales and leasing systems for Data Consultants that are still evolving and popular today with automobile sales companies.

Dan with guitar

Summarizing, one might say I am a software and systems architect and a bit of a generalist.

What kind?  Well, I’ve had my hands into all kinds of IT work.  At PeopleSoft After working in the trenches for a couple decades coding, managing systems, performing applied research, technical support, and such, I find I much prefer working at a higher level as a chief systems or software architect, mentoring, serving in the role of Director of Operations or IT.

So much for untangling.  What other experience do I have?

I have worked in various industries including large business, small startups, NASA, education, and pharmacy and enjoy working in a capacity where I play a major part in the success of the company.  I like stock options as they give a feeling of ownership where the company’s success directly affects your success.

Going back to my technical background, over the years, what kind of programs did I create?  Well, web, batch, interactive, Unix internals, device drivers, compilers, accounting, scientific, mathematical, networking, transaction processing, SQL, etc.

What languages?  Well, I suppose whatever is best for the situation — C, C++, shell scripting, Perl, PL/SQL, Java, PHP, HTML, XML, CSS, various 4GL’s, Basic, COBOL, Fortran, Pascal, whatever gets the job done best.

What databases do I like?  Oracle is probably my favorite, but MySQL, SqlServer, and Sybase are nice, and perhaps Postgres, and DB2, Informix, and Ingres are databases I can work with, and they’re OK, too.

What else?  I manage systems, networks, projects, people, perform systems architecture, software architecture, network architecture, work as an employee or as a consultant, whatever is necessary to make a company viable, if I can do it, and if I cannot, I’m happy to be resourceful and find someone who can.

Ok.  That’s my career, but who am I?  Who is Daniel J. Dick?

My resume picture

Well, I’m a proud father of an awesome 16 year old daughter I love with all my heart — Michelle.

I have the best wife a guy could be married to — Eileen, a beautiful godly Chinese Singaporean lady who spent 7 years of her life in Adelaide, Australia working with severely autistic children and adults who is a true expert in her field.

I’m 6′1″ tall, born in California, Scottish, Dutch, Irish, English, and perhaps a little French or German.

I have exactly two parents, no more, no less, and one of each gender,  and a brother who is male and a sister who is female.  I have a dog and a cat, oh, and a huge number of great in-laws — five brothers in law and five sisters in law — oh, yeah, my sister’s husband makes it six brothers in law.  (My wife has a large family.)  I have a niece named Chynasia and one named Andrea.

Ok.  Enough boring verbalized home movies…who am I?  Who is Daniel J. Dick?

Well, hmmm.  I have hobbies, photography, music, theology, math, physics, motorcycles and cars, and I used to ride a unicycle when I was younger.  I play trombone and guitar and sing and my sister thinks I play every musical instrument, but I don’t think I even come close.  But, I’ve tried many, and I tend to like them all.

I’m terribly curious about almost everything.  As a kid I participated in honor bands and had planned to become a professional musician.  However, I also took up engineering, minored in physics, majored in applied mathematics, and took first place one year and second place the other year I competed in my university’s mathematics competition.  Here is a panoramic photograph I took from atop Mt. Diablo stitched together from several photographs.

A panoramic view from atop Mt. Diablo

I’m not much into IQ scores, but I’ve been tested a few times with different kinds of tests with results ranging all the way from 110 to 190 or 200, but my general IQ is said to be around 144.  The higher scores are for my logical and mechanical reasoning, pattern matching, and such, and the lower scores are related to auditory memory or memory by rote.  In other words, I usually have to comprehend something deeply and model it in my mind in order to remember it, and then I can remember almost any small detail about it.

But, who is Daniel J. Dick?  What are my core beliefs and values?

Actually, I’m a creation of God.  But, so is everyone.

I’m a believer in God.  Well, so is Satan, but he doesn’t serve God.

I’m a servant of God, a friend of God, a man who loves God, who loves people, a man who appreciates the gift of life and salvation that came from God through Christ.

I believe people begin with what God makes them at birth, but beyond God’s creation, a person’s identity comes from choices the person himself or herself makes — what to value, what to believe, what to search for, what to live for, what direction to take in life, what dreams we will choose to embrace and make happen.

So, tell me more…

Who is the real santa clause?

I believe the best way to tell someone something is to show them.  I’m not much for adjectives.  I like nouns and verbs.

Rather than saying Hitler was a cold blooded mass murderer, I prefer to show people what he was and name specific actions he took that led others or forced others or caused them to cower into carrying out the millions of cold blooded murders.  I believe this approach is more interesting and tends to accomplish more to help prevent such atrocities from happening again and to give focus to specific actions and choices people can make to improve the situation in the world today.

Rather than saying I am against racism and genocide, I would rather take specific actions that oppose racism and genocide.  Rather than claim to be pro-family, I would rather take actions that lead to an improvement in family life so that more children grow up in loving families.  Rather than believing in the American legal system, I would rather bring to attention the dangers of judicial hubris, judicial activism, the prostitution of justice, profitable injustice, and the destruction of families of little children for wealth derived from stealing from faithful spouses to coddle the unfaithful.

Thus, while I strive to maintain my ethics and professionalism, I cannot compromise my integrity and speak falsely in favor of values which I hold to be dishonest and harmful.  And if a job demands dishonesty in some circumstances, then I would be the wrong person for that job.  If a job requires abandoning the needs of my family to the harm of my family, then that, too, would be an inappropriate job for me.  If a job requires me to sin against God by working to obtain ill-gotten gain or to commit sin to gain the support of potential clients or to lie to make a sale, I would be the wrong person for that job.

However, all in all, this article does not tell you as much about me as it does about how I view myself which is only one small aspect to what makes up who a person is.  I would not claim to know nearly as much about myself as God knows about me, and I recognize that other people viewing me from the outside are well able to tell me things about myself that I do not know and cannot see myself as my eyes tend to point outward rather than inward from the outside.  Thus, I have to rely on information coming in from the outside to tell me who I am and then evaluate that information as to whether it is self-consistent or whether it is consistent with everything else I observe from within my own skin.  Whether this is a worthwhile activity or not, I am unsure.  In a sense it isn’t good to be overly ego-centric.  Yet, to be the best servant of God and of others, we all have to be open to learn more about ourselves from others and humble enough to listen with an open mind, not accepting everything, but not choosing whether to accept or reject solely on the basis of personal comfort either.

So, have I shown you who I am?  Or have I merely told you?  Are you convinced?  Or do you see this as entirely wrong or partially right?