Special Time : Road Trip

Lets drive to Chicago. In hindsight, change is traveling forward. Fourth of July is a special time for change. In 1999, I finished developing my first websites for a publisher near San Francisco, California. The publisher and two of his authors took me to Egypt, Greece, Israel, and Turkey. After setting up an e-commerce websites so his secretary could sell his books online, I drove towards Los Angeles, and arrived on the Fourth of July in Hollywood, where I earned $70 per hour at Jerry Lewis’ Muscular Dystrophy Foundation. The executives needed a website for an evening with the celebrities starring at the Beverly Hills Hilton. After that job, the military came to California to recruit me for a position as producer for a video website in Jacksonville, Florida. Before websites like YouTube, my group was video encoding. I created the first investment tutorial CD for eSchwab at Charles Schwab in San Francisco, so we took tutorials from Jacksonville, Florida to teach staff in the Navy via video as they took classes from boats out at sea. That project finished in July. The world leader in nanotechnology offered me a free apartment with a salary in Santa Barbara, California. I pulled into Santa Barbara after a week on the road from Jacksonville, Florida as the fireworks were going off at a local stadium. After driving for a week, I watched the fireworks from a laundry mat parking lot as my clothes spun clean. I was the first Web Administrator for the company creating world class atomic force microscopes with cutting edge technology dealing with nanometers. The Santa Barbara company was bought by two scientists that developed the helium leak detector for the Manhattan Project in 1945. The Manhattan Project scientists created the first atomic bomb. The engineers hired a staff of web professionals on the East Coast. Their director invited me to their headquarters in Long Island, New York for Fourth of July Weekend. I arrived for a party at the Bryant Park Grill held by Microsoft’s Bill Gates on 42nd Street. Within three days, I had a new apartment in New York City. Fourth of July is a special time for career changes.