manager/news director of AFRTS stations (Iceland, Philippines), daily newspaper front-page editor, television videographer and news anchorman, TV public affairs director,
and a politician (Administrative Assistant, Board of County Commissioners). In the latter capacity, I learned that the mainframe programmers who worked for the county could actually make a program do what the user (me) wanted; not just what they thought it should do. El Paso County may not have benefited from that knowledge, but I sure did. Next thing y'know, I had a CP/M machine and taught myself CBASIC. About the same time, I decided I could run the county better than my boss, and wound up as Commissioner Chairman (1975-1979).
I am honored by having my name on a couple of public buildings, including our Pikes Peak Center public auditorium. But politics didn't interest me as a lifelong career -- too many people recognize you in the supermarket checkout line. So I did not seek re-election, and began freelancing as a computer specialist.
Then came an Apple ][, a clutch of TRS-80s, modems, operating a BBS and some computer userdom notoriety as author of the original operator's manual for TBBS. Taught myself dBase and Turbo Pascal, and worked for five years as a commercial freelance programmer, specializing in databases. Meantime, my wife (an experienced Certified Medical Transcriptionist) was putting together a commercial word processing firm that successfully transitioned from Selectrics to computers. I became chief tech support for a multi-employee job-typing empire that we finally decided was too large (as SOHO began coming on), so we dissolved while we were ahead. Along the way, I had colon cancer -- a little personal travail with which I won't bore you, except to say I don't have it any more.
About that time, a broadcast industry contact called and said, "Why don't you do a talk show on using computers?" That turned into a three-year gig for Business Radio Network's "Computing Success!" -- 1991 Best Radio Show award from the Computer Press Association. (John Dvorak came in second.) From that, evolved a PC World "Business Fixtures" column that was actually kind of disastrous: I couldn't handle the three-month-lag leadtime, so we mutually parted company. I'd rather freelance, and be today-timely.
I've been happy with my writing years. My first national story (in Basic Computing, on computerized voting) was published in 1983, and I've done hundreds of reviews and articles since.
All that national exposure, however, did let me get together with some neat people. Like Jerry Pournelle and I
once hamming it up at a Denver online-users computer seminar. Michael Miller (now editor of PC Magazine, then of InfoWorld) and I teamed up on a lot of radio activity as well as broadcast 
coverage from a Vegas Comdex, interviewing people like Michael Dell and Andy Grove. Bill Gates and I once shared a coffee table, as he talked intensely about Chicago. Steve Jobs gave me an eyeball-to-eyeball personal sales pitch about the Next, in a back corner of a Los Angeles ampitheater. Van Wolverton was a regular on the BBS I once ran, calling from his Montana ranch to Colorado Springs just to yak with other BBSers. The designer of the famed Cheetah i486, Ron Sartore, allowed me to scavenge his stockpile of Cheetah parts as the firm was closing down. All of which only goes to prove I can namedrop with the best of 'em.
Prior to my 1998 retirement, I was a Product Reviewer for the Software Library Evaluations Division (SLED) of ZD Net, one of a national team responsible for the independent review of all software products posted on the various ZD Net services. I have also taught hands-on HTML courses for ZDNet University, a leading-edge effort that was a mini-career of its own. But you can't believe how boring looking at new software products becomes until you're done it for more than five years. Approaching burnout, I was happy to turn in my Social Security paperwork.
So here I is, father of four, grandfather of six, married for nearly 45 years, living in a lovely home whose living room bay window frames our view of Pikes Peak. My wife (who works remotely for Penrose Hospital, getting/returning her work by modem) offices upstairs, swiveling between two Pentiums. I'm downstairs, swiveling between a couple of machines; one of which is equipped with ATI TV and a cable connection. Two of my sons are in high mucky-muck tech industry jobs; one in Denver as an EDS graphics design specialist, and the other running his own spray-coatings firm in California. My daughter runs her own SOHO word processing firm (while raising four children) in Wyoming. A third son sells paint at a WalMart in Gillette (hey, we can't all be into computers, but he does have a Internet-linked PC).
My kids all think I'm a great guy, if I'd only figger out what I'm going to do with my life. (Obviously, I think they're rather great, too.)