JAIrwin.com - F.A.Q.

Frequently Asked Questions

Actually, I haven't gotten enough feedback for any question to be called "frequently asked". Consider this rather the "Questions I Think You Might Want To Ask" list:

• What's It All About?
• What Are Your Qualifications?
• Are You Interested In A Full-Time Job?
• How Do I Contact You?
• What Is Your Approach to Networking and Programming?
• So you're another anti-big-software company zealot?

What's It All About? - This site is basically my "digital resume". I'm an independent consultant with a wide variety of energy engineering and networking experience, offering my services to the world at large. For the last twelve years I have offered these services to ESCOs as a full-time employee. At present I feel that my talents are most efficiently utilized working directly for you. "You" might be a small company looking for a means of reducing operating costs, or you might be a Performance Contracting Company or Energy Services Company caught with a temporary need for additional engineering resources. In either case, I might have a solution for you. "You" might also be a small company with a need for some assistance in updating your local network and wide-area communications to meet the expectations of the modern electronic marketplace. I may be able to help you find a cost-effective means of meeting that need.

What Are Your Qualifications? - A later update of this site will include a copy of my resumé. As a brief summary - I earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Kansas, and have worked in the Energy Services field since 1989. I have been working as a consultant since 2002.

Are You Interested In A Full-Time Job? - I always keep my eyes open to opportunities. Shortly after being unexpectedly released from my last full-time position I saw the opportunity to provide services (and provide myself with income) as an independent consultant. I have operated in situations requiring "banker's hours" office attendance, flex-time, home office, extensive travel, and various combinations of those. Should an opportunity be presented which is appropriate to my experience I would certainly give it due consideration.

How Do I Contact You? - I will not post an email address on an open web page due to "spam-crawler" programs which harvest those addresses for the purposes of sending unsolicited advertising. Instead, please fill out the form on my contact page and I will reply as soon as possible.

What Is Your Approach to Networking and Programming? - I am so glad you asked! I am a very firm believer in Open Standards and Open Source Programming. Open standards are a really good thing because they allow greater connectivity with other systems which may not share a particular closed standard. For example, if company A had some proprietary email protocol internally they might have trouble communicating with company B which might have a different protocol. With current email standards, company A can communicate easily with company B because both of their mail systems share internet standard email standards. If you use an instant messaging client, think for a moment about that. Let's assume for a moment that you use "M" company's proprietary chat client. You want to have a quick discussion with somebody who uses "Y" company's chat client. Because both companies use proprietary standards, there is no easy way of bridging the "protocol-gap". Either you or your (prospective customer? contractor?) will have to open an account on another chat service, and install a client that will work with the other's protocol. If instead you and your (customer? contractor?) used IRC (Internet Relay Chat) - an open protocol - as your chat protocol it wouldn't matter what client you used. You would be able to contact each other, once you had appropriate addresses, just as easily as you email each other. Similarly, you can easily trade text files as *.txt, or *.rtf without any concern over whether either you or your counterpart uses MS Word® or WordPerfect® as your word processor. I tend to lean toward open standards for all computer and networking protocols. I also prefer Open Source solutions. First of all, most open source solutions are free - which is a benefit obvious to most accountants. Secondly, popular open source projects can attract literally thousands of developers to update, improve, and secure the product. Commercial products have a primary motivation of selling more licenses, so the majority of developers are assigned to adding features. A quick look at update patches for any commercial operating system or application will show how often those developers leave open security holes. In the case of open source software most of the developers are also users, and they tend to have the same concerns and desires as the rest of the users. For networking products in particular, this is a really good thing. Best of all, it is very possible to create a network using all open source solutions which will enable efficient, effective, and cost-effective solutions to networking tasks, completely transparently to the end-user. Mail can be easily (and cheaply) handled by open-source servers and mail programs as effectively as with proprietary mailers, and perhaps more securely and with less vulnerability to email-distributed viruses. End users can still use popular clients, and in fact can choose other clients (or network administrators have a choice of clients to assign/install). While security exploits will still occasionally happen with either open or closed source providers, the large base of user/developers for open source have repeatedly demonstrated the ability to respond to security issues much faster (often before they are exploited) than commercial closed-source providers. I believe in using the correct tool for any given job. For some graphic designers a Macintosh running the latest version of Photoshop is the the best tool, for some engineers the best tool might be a Pentium or AMD processor with the latest Microsoft© operating system and a collection of vendor software. The task of integrating these end uses along with perhaps a wide area network, virtual private networking for remote users, and possibly mainframe applications is a task that I have found to be best met with open standards, and open source software solutions.

So you're another anti-big-software company zealot? - Not at all! Actually I'm a big fan of some of the solutions provided by big software companies. One company in particular took the "spreadsheet" concept and made what I consider the best reason for most business people to have a computer in the first place. They did so at the expense of nearly driving the company that first introduced a spreadsheet program into near-obscurity, but that's just marketplace competition. What I object to is the obstruction of communication. Open standards lead to easier, better communication. The purpose of networking is communication, thus open standards tend to be better solutions to networking needs. Additonally, network connectivity leads to exposure to malevolent forces - hacking and viruses. Homogeneous networking, using one vendor for network solutions and desktop applications, leaves your network exposed to any security exploit that takes advantage of that commonality. One example of the danger of this is the late 1990's email virus attacks. Because so many corporate networks relied on one vendor for networking, email, and desktop applications the virus writers were able to cripple a lot of networks that they had no prior knowledge of - they just designed an attack that would cripple a pretty common network setup. Networks that used a different mailer, or had some other barrier between mail client and desktop software were not affected at all by the virus. I personally suffered with a "commercial solutions" network that was shut down for a full day by an email virus. Many colleges and private sites that used open source networking solutions continued to operate through that particular virus scare.