TMI® (Too Much Information) about Steve

You may already know a little bit about me, depending on how you found out about this site. Anyway, here’s a little bit more information, some would say “Too Much Information” (TMI®). Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? I was born on June 6, 1959 in Kenmore, New York. The third of four boys. My given name is Stephen Thomas D’Aiello. That was changed about a month after I was born, for some unknown reason, by my parents, to Stephen Thomas Dale.

My family moved around quite a bit when I was growing up. I lived in the Buffalo, NY area for about six years at 160 Greentree Road, Tonanwanda, NY. For some odd reason, I have that address permanently stored in my head. Must have been brainwashed to remember it, in case I ever got lost as a little kid going to school or something. We moved to Clove Road on Staten Island, NY for a year, then north to Framingham, Massachusetts, where we hung out for a whopping two years, finally settling in Wayne, New Jersey. I went to Preakness Elementary school and Schuyler Colfax Junior High school in the Wayne, NJ public school system, and then on to DePaul High School, a Catholic high school known for its sports and academic programs. (of course, I wasn’t known for either my scholastic or athletic ability, but that’s what older brothers are for anyway)

Off to college at the University of Dayton, in Dayton Ohio. I didn’t think when I started out it would take me five years to finish, or that I’d change my major about once a year, finally settling on Accounting in December of my senior year, but hey,  I had a lot of fun, and look where it got me! After I graduated in 1982 with a stellar GPA, I had all of the Big 8 accounting firms actively seeking my resume. (NOT!) Actually, I worked as an assistant manager at the Ground Round Restaurant in Kettering, OH. After two years of that torture, I decided to pursue getting a real job, and in August of 1984 I was hired as a mailroom temp by IBM in Franklin Lakes, NJ.

OK, so being a mailroom clerk wasn’t exactly the career move you were thinking I was gonna make, right? I did that for a month before I was hired permanently as an Accountant by IBM. Yay! My five years of college education was actually going to pay off! Well, I played the Accounting Game at IBM for about seven years. Then one day, while I was working on an accounting system with my friend Darlene, she suggested that I was probably better suited to a job in programming than accounting. Something to do with machines and code being easier to deal with than people, no doubt.

After a bit of schooling provided by IBM, I was assigned to a mainframe programming project in Sterling Forest, NY. The application I was developing ran on IBM’s MVS operating system, written in IBM’s PL/1 programming language and using IBM’s DB2 relational database product. That lasted for a couple years, and then IBM hit some hard times. I bounced around, working on several other mainframe applications until early 1995. That’s when things really started to change… My manager got me into a fast path Client/Server – Open Systems – Internetworking certification program in Austin, Texas that lasted from May until November of 1995. So, here I am, seven years later, hacking code (programming) for IBM on all the latest and greatest. Who knew?

So, there I was, hacking code in Sterling Forest, NY right? What could be better? Around March of 1998, I was assigned to a new project. Hmm, March 1998 is about the time I met Nhut, in case you were wondering… Anyway, back to work related stuff, again, using the latest Buzzword® technology… this time it was Web, Java, NT, MQSeries, Notes, Domino… (ad nauseum). Well, how about hacking that code in Dallas for three or four months? ummmm… sure. The hardware for this application project could fill a datacenter all by itself, so it’s kinda cool. A great learning experience, which will get me ready for my next move. Move? What! What did you say???

In case you’ve been asleep for the past year, I’ve moved! West… to San Jose. Sometime around June of 1999. Mr. Peabody and I will be living in earthquake country. Here are some pictures of my place in San Jose. Oh, and this is about the time that Nhut moved in with me in San Jose, in August of 1999. Mr. Peabody would have to learn how to share… cause pretty soon afterwards, Sidney and Joe showed up!

btw… I started this blog in October 2002, do try to keep up.

Oh, If you haven’t noticed, I’ve moved again, this time to Austin, Texas. (I get the feeling like I’ve been here before) Pictures of the new house and pool, and lots of other stuff in the gallery.