Professional Information and Background

UPDATED 10/12/98

Currently, I work in Thousand Oaks, CA at the headquarters for Amgen, the world's largest independent biotech company. I work for the Corporate Information Systems (CIS) department in the Data Center Operations group, maintaining the company's NT infrastructure, e-mail systems (Exchange, UNIX and internet link), Network Administration (NT), Oracle database administration, and a variety of other tasks.

I started at Amgen as a temporary/contract employee in the Stationary Supply room in October of 1992 (my gosh, has it been 6 years!?), passing out pens, pencils, notebooks, etc.
In January of 1993 I was hired by Amgen as a Mail Clerk working in the corporate Mail Center. It was this position that gave me my first real introduction to computer in a coporate environment. It was also the first time using a Macintosh computer (yes, Amgen was primarily Mac at the time) and a vast array of applications I'd never used before; FileMaker Pro, Excel, Word and QuickMail (the corporate e-mail at the time) to name just a few. It also gave me the chance to start checking out this thing called the internet. (In '93 not too many people knew what it was.)
The experience and knowledge I obtained with these applications, along with some custom applications I developed in FileMaker Pro, helped me to obtain a position with the corporate Help Desk in July of 1994. My new duties involved answering numerous phone calls from Amgen staff and helping them resolve problems they were having in the applications I mentioned as well as others. Situations which couldn't be resolved over the phone I would be enter into a work order database and they would be routed to a field techician.
In November of 1995 our Help Desk began using Vantive for our Help Desk Application. I was selected to be the technical administrator of the application which allowed me (or forced me) to learn a variety of different systems; Oracle, UNIX, VBA, SQL, PL/SQL, and Vantive itself. It was about this time that I began building and maintaining websites on our intranet also.
In January of 1998 I accepted a new position in the Data Center Operations group with the responsibilities of maintaining the NT infrastructure, e-mail systems (mostly Exchange), internet access (i.e. firewall), DNS, NIS+, NT network access, Oracle DBA functions, some Vantive administration, and other corporate-wide systems.

I'm currently pursuing my MCSE and have completed 5/6 tests. I have my MCP in NT Server 4.0, NT Workstation 4.0, and NT Server 4.0 in the Enterprise as well as having passed TCP/IP and Network Administration. I hope to take my last test, Exchange 5.5, later this month or early November. (I've been procrastinating.)

Although I've come along way from when I first used a Macintosh in '94, as an computer user (in addition to doing support) it's still my favorite platform. It's what I use at home and I still have one on my desk at work (in addition to my Compaq PC). At home I use Virtual PC to run Windows NT on my Mac and it works great. My professional recommendation: get yourself a Mac.