Career

Career has been major in my life. I have had the good fortune to have always worked very hard at things I have enjoyed. I began regular work carrying coal and ashes for elderly neighbors in our village, Locke, New York, at about nine years old, advanced to mowing their lawns, and then to living and working on farms near the village from age fifteen to eighteen.

I still work farmers' hours and still enjoy it all.



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Founder and CEO
Spider Graphics Corporation
410 Upland Road, Ithaca, NY 14850
1994 to present
www.spidergraphics.com

I dropped everything else I was doing and started this company on January 1, 1995. Susan Hill and Wendy Fuller each contributed money and considerable skill to the launch. For the first few months we sold basic brochure websites to Bed and Breakfast clients and to Wineries. We launched our first e-commerce website for Worldwide Books in August that year - 3000 lines of PERL script, and launched a second e-commerce website three months later. This was before the word "e-commerce" was invented.




Spider Graphics was immediately the region's leading source for quality website design and browser-interfaced databases. It remains so. At Spider Graphics I do these tasks:

  • Take first responsibility for business development, technology development, and administration.
  • Plan and supervise all phases of the operation now supporting 250 hosted clients. Clients range from small retail websites to complete e-commerce sites to online management systems for business and for academic administration.
  • Execute project assignments in Internet systems and database systems consulting, design, and planning.
  • Plan, maintain, and implement the hosting system.
  • Lead planning projects for clients when the project involves new technologies or new applications of technologies.
  • Explore and test new technology paths for the Corporation.


Truth is, I do whatever has to be done.

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CEO, CybroTech.com
The Commons, Ithaca, NY 14850
1999 to present

There have been few career events I have entered with more enthusiasm than this attempt to launch an Application Service Provider (ASP) company serving online management software for Architecture Firms. In some sense cybrotech.com blends two careers for me, one in architecture and one in whatever browser-based, database-integration, company-launching should be called. The project, the whole thing, is now dormant, but could see new life in 2005.

CybroTech.com represented a great concept that got high ratings in market testing, but was ot successfully launched. Partly because most efforts of this type crashed in mid-2000 and partly because the organizations and individuals involved are busy being successful in other undertakings.

CybroTech.com offered online studio management software for architects and engineers. It effectively eliminated application maintenance cost and overhead.

Online services form a major sector in current computer technology trends. Businesses are moving rapidly to online services due to the shrinking computer skills pool and high costs of purchasing and maintaining in-house, workstation-by-workstation, desk-top systems.



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Co-CEO Cornerstone Land Planning
313 North Tioga Street, Ithaca, New York
1992 - 1995

Was responsible for business development, technology development, and administration for a consulting and video production firm creating computerized simulations of proposed building projects and providing municipal planning services.

This company never became anything exceptional, but it was a precursor to Spider Graphics and also an opportunity to look into one of the career niches of professional design, Land Use Planning. After this look I would leave it altogether.

Video Production

On the technology side Cornerstone Land Planning took on creating video simulations of proposed building projects. This whole function within planning and design would in a few years be subsumed by modules added onto computer aided design software (CAD), such as, AutoCad. In the small interval before that happened we had great fun and made a little money learning video production and coming up with inexpensive ways to display the structures of the future.

Our time machine was unique in some ways. In particular, rather than following the emerging industry which strove to improve computer-generated imaging and to use that to model proposed structures, we made video of structures that approximated the ones we wanted to model and then edited the video. This was a process with a short future because computer simulation was coming on strong, but it enabled totally realistic models with full detail. This still cannot be done today with even Hollywood quality simulations.

Municipal Planning

Architects I worked for often assigned me planning projects. It's all the conceptual stuff that comes before actually laying out a building or community. In some cases it was municipal planning - where should the streets run, does this population need a library more than a pool, and all of that.

I enjoyed this work and wanted to get further into it. Cornerstone L and Planning was designed to provide the opportunity and it surely did. There were several projects, but the two that were most significant involved a fairly typical rural Town with an extraordinary regard for planning and an innovative new community with a huge agenda.

Town of Nelson

Working for the Town of Nelson I helped the Planning Board develop a new Master Plan for the Town and then a complete revision of Zoning and Subdivision Ordinances. The project stretched through two years seeing many revisions and broad public input.


Citizens in the rural Town of Nelson, care very much about their town.
Together we studied hundreds of things about it.


EcoVillage

For me the EcoVillage project began on a beautiful May morning in a hay field with several hundred idealists expressing hopes and dreams of the best kind. I fell in love with this project, gave it some of my best work ever, became for an exciting couple years its lead planner, and still visit it when I need to feel good about how people might live together in peace and harmony with each other and the Earth.


EcoVillage is idealistic as an organization,
as a community, and as architecture.


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Adjunct Professor (Part-time)
Communications Department, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY
1994-1996

Taught software survey lab course in Multimedia Design.



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Marketing Manager, Microcomputer Power Software (Part-time)
111 Clover Lane, Ithaca, NY 14850
1992 -1997

Was responsible for international sales and product handling for a company specialized in statistical software for field biologists.



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Designer & Project Manager, Robert S. Leathers, P.C., Architects
99 East Lake Road, Lansing, NY
1989 - 1992

Was associate in charge of commercial and residential project design and construction. Among other projects, created plans and oversaw construction of four highly designed residences while at Leathers and in the following years. Designed small double-curvature structures.





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Assistant Professor, Broome Community College, Civil Engineering Department
Front Street, Binghamton, NY
1986 - 1989

Taught courses in computer-aided-design, architectural design, and construction management.



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Principal Researcher, Solstice Technology
Albany Street, Ithaca, NY
1982 - 1985

Was technology consultant to manufacturers of innovative building systems and designed solar-heated drying ovens for rail-car-sized industrial products.



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Avionics, Staff Sergeant, US Air Force
1967 - 1972

After basic training and one year of electronics school was assigned to aircraft maintenance at Scott Air Force Base, Bellevue, Illinois (near St. Louis)

Served in 1339th Search and Rescue Squadron on Tuy Hoa Air Base, Vietnam maintaining HC130P rescue aircraft.

Served in the secret 7405th recognizance squadron at Wiesbaden Air Base, Germany maintaining flight control and navigation systems on C97 aircraft fitted for electronic and optical snooping. Calibrated the first GPS system fitted to an aircraft. GPS was a "top secret" military-only system at that time.



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EDUCATION:

Master of Architecture
Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1982

Bachelor of Architecture, Magna cum laude
Syracuse University, 1975

Associate Degree in Liberal Arts
University of Maryland, Wiesbaden, Germany Campus, 1972

Associate in Applied Science,Forestry
Paul Smith College, 1966

Second Language: German, was fluent, now rusty, still read and write on a colloquial level. Lived three years in Germany. Much other travel.



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SKILLS:

Administration: Am thoroughly familiar with business administration having twenty years experience running several types of businesses; innovator in job cost tracking, mail order automation, and electronic corporate communication

Leadership: Am persuasive and effective leader of projects; presently leading one team of fourteen diverse professionals in very competitive field of Internet communication planning, development, and hosting with large and small corporate and university clients and a second team of architects, engineers, and computer programmers in launching an ASP. Have led community planning and design projects involving hundreds of participants in design sessions and in public project reviews

Programming and systems integration: Have used computers in education and business since the mid-sixties, starting with avionics, then job cost tracking and construction estimating using dial-up service bureaus; then system development with VisiCalc and DBase; considerable system integration and production management with AutoCad, Lotus, TruVision; extensive production work with all of the Abode suite; currently using and supervising Internet technologies including planning, management, and production of website design, website hosting, server set-up, and web/database integration projects; since 1995, daily hands-on with UNIX shell administration, NT server set-up and maintenance, website authoring and management packages, PERL editing, JavaScript, HTML, Tango middleware, Cold Fusion middleware, and web animation design; some experience programming SQL, C++, and FORTRAN.




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Don Ellis
Trumansburg, New York, US
All rights reserved
Last update November 16, 2005