I was introduced to computers, as a small child during the 60s , from watching Batman and seeing the Batcomputer. I was always a fan of the show, but I think my career-Marine father questioned the fact that his son admired a guy who wore purple satin briefs over gray pantyhose.

While my father was in Vietnam, he sent back a sheet of green-bar computer paper with the Bat Signal printed on it. Evidently, some of the MIS guys had printed this out along with some risqué ASCII-art calendars. This printout awakened my love of science and technology. At eight years old, I thought it was incredible that you could program a machine to print the Bat Signal. (As a young child, I thought the printed bat logo was cool. In junior high school, I wished I had gotten one of the calendars instead.)

When I was in the third grade, a fellow student said there was a really great television show called Star Trek . I went home and that night saw the last ten minutes of Star Trek's last network showing. I was very disappointed. It seemed like such a great show; after all, it had science, technology and semi-clad women painted green.

When Star Trek went into syndication, I was elated. My parents were furious. Birthdays, holidays and family gatherings would become disrupted, as I often had to stop what I was doing and watch Star Trek.

My fondness for science and computers did not diminish until my sophomore year in college when I got a "D" in physics. Of course, this was on top of the "C-" I got in calculus and PASCAL. I had no other choice but to sheepishly admit defeat in the sciences and become a humanities major.

As a history major, I took a series of courses on the history of Science. My instructor, Dr. Ronald Tobey, taught us about the passions, beliefs and philosophies of people like Newton, Galileo and Einstein. My passion for science was renewed by Dr. Tobey .

My senior year of college (fall of '82) I took a class in BASIC that was taught by, besides Dr. Tobey, one of the best instructors at UC Riverside , Mr. Ganeshallingham. He didn't have a Ph.D., nor a full professorship at the University,... he was just a lecturer with a B.S. degree. His remarkable talent, though, was his ability to teach his students the "logic" of programming. Within a few weeks, his students were able to write executable programs in BASIC and understand why their programs worked (or didn't work).

I knew that programming was my goal and my quest. The only problem was that I was about to graduate college and my funding from Bank of Mom and Dad was going to end. Also, I was burnt out and I dreaded the thought of going back for three more years.

After college, I fell into accounting and credit management in 1987. It is not what I wanted to do, but it had been a stable source of income. On the side, I pursued programming from time to time. I took a class in RPG in 1985, when IBM midsize mainframes were in vogue. In the fall of 1993, I tried to learn the programming language C.

I decided to "bite the financial bullet" and go back to school full time and get my Computer Science degree. I continued to work at my, then, current employer, Kofax Image Products and go to school in an accelerated program at National University . I finally graduated May of 1998.

I was hired into the technical support department in the summer of 1997 at the company that I had been working for, since May 1992. Originally, I was hired to do credit and accounts receivable.

Credit was a career path that I had been trying to get out of since 1990. When I went to Kofax, I would live vicariously through the engineers and technical staff. I was the "credit guy" who wanted to be one of the "geeks". Through my efforts at school and the support of my many friends at Kofax, I was recognized as potentially more than a "bean counter". I waved good-bye to a decade-long career, that started from a suggestion by my ex-wife.

The job in support had proven to be an opportunity beyond my wildest expectations. I had never had to learn so much in so little time. The amount of knowledge that I had obtained from ten years of Credit Management had been surpassed in a matter of weeks in Tech Support. This was due to the sheer volume of things I had to learn. The rapid advances in the technology industry make it so that one must stay in a perpetual learning mode just to stay "afloat".

I left Kofax in July 1998, moved a mile down the road, and started working in developer support at what would become, Epicor Software . When I was looking for work, I thought I should utilize all my work experience. It seemed logical that I should try to use my technical and business skills at a company that develops accounting software. The other product that they had was their "Internet Object Server". It was a simple ODBC query tool but the training for the class turned out to be a two day seminar on COM and n-tier programming theory. This got me interested in re-coding my senior project so that it became an n-tier e-commerce site.

In October 1999, I was able to make the move out of Epicor's Support Department and move into Development. This was the first time in 16 years that I had not had to work in a heavy customer contact environment. When I was in school at National University, we used to joke about the idea of being stuck in cubicle and in front of a PC. It sounded so appealing since most of us had jobs with heavy customer contact. I found this article, that typifies the "sweat shop" environment of working in technical support.

I was checking the job boards, when I saw a company with a familiar name... Epicor. Although Kofax was my first computer company, I was losing contact with those that remained and those had mostly been in Administration and Accounting. I had been going to lunches, weddings and other social events with the gang from Platinum/Epicor. I started back, working in the Sales department, doing VB/COM web applications.

I did get involved in a VB.Net certificate program through Cal State Fullerton. It was going to be a 4 part program that would run from March 2002 to December of that same year. Initially, I took the class to hang with my pals from Epicor while I was dealing with the instability of MyDrugRep. I have gotten to do several prototypes in .Net and I had written a production app. I am working on an application for registering people to Epicor trade-shows with my friends Louie and Sanjay.

I have been living in Laguna Hills since January 1991. I have a wonderful view of the surrounding hills and on a clear day in winter, it seems like you can see forever. I live within a few miles of what was the El Toro Marine base. With the end of the cold war, the base was closed in 1997. One of the past benefits of being near the base was that I used to end up with a great view of the Marine Corps Air Show. Here is a picture, that was taken from my balcony, of one of the Blue Angels doing a flyby.

I do have a few interests beyond computing and sci-fi TV shows. I was involved in the Pageant of the Masters , it has been a wonderful experience. It is a tableaux that is performed during July and August in Laguna Beach, California. In 1999, I was in the Salvadore Dali's version of the Last Supper. In 2000, I reprised my role as the elder disciple, Simon-Peter in Da Vinci's The Last Supper. It is an all volunteer event. In my experience, it is one of the most professional performing groups I have ever worked with.

You can e-mail me at home bill@wmiller.com