"Gather each of the dropped petals from the spent flowers of your life's treasures
and reintoxicate yourself remembering the fragrance when they first came to you.
And tell those you love how much they mean to you each day,
even when you are not so inclined."
--author unknown

J. W. Rider's

Very First Webpage

A quarter century of system development experience at various sites around the US.
Texas-born and raised, but currently living in Herndon, Virginia
(the Northern Virginia / National Capitol region).

Current activities

• Software developer for Pragmatics, Inc., (McLean, VA) currently working on satellite communications systems for the Defense Information System Agency. Previously, I worked on medical bibliographic systems at the National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD). (Sometimes, this gets referred to as my real job or as the day job that I shouldn't give up prior to embarking upon a new career as a country and western singer.)

• Internet Grateful Med. This site includes internet access to the MEDLINE bibliography. MEDLINE is one of several medical bibliographic systems at NLM which I develop software to maintain.
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• Adjunct Faculty, Northern Virginia Community College, Loudon Campus, where I teach computer science and information system technology topics. (Some of my programming students might be reading this right now. You know who you are, and you should really be working on your homework.)

• Current syllabus
• Other educational links

• Team Borland ("TeamB"). Volunteering my time and experiences to help others get the most that they can out of Borland Delphi.

• Borland International
• Kent Reisdorph's TeamB web page
• Washington DC Delphi User Group
• Other Delphi-related links

• Member, Association of Computing Machinery. I pay a lot of attention to the Special Interest Groups for Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) and Software Engineering (SIGSOFT).

Previous Activities

• Commander, United States Naval Reserve (Retired). Formerly, the administrative officer for the General Volunteer Training Unit in Washington DC.

• Navy & Marine Corps Reserve Center, Anacostia
• Naval Reserve Readiness Command Region Six
• 
• Other Navy links

• Contributing Author, Special Edition Using Delphi 3 by Todd Miller, David Powell, et al.(1997, Que). I'm one of the "et al". The chapters on the Object Pascal programming language that forms the basis for Delphi is my fault.

• Judge (Computer Science), Virginia State Science and Engineering Fair (1996/1997). Sometimes it was hard to remember that I was dealing with "mere" high school students while I was evaluating each of their exhibits. Professional developers need to start paying heed to this up-and-coming group.

• Technical Editor for Charlie Calvert's Delphi 2 Unleashed (1996, Sam's Publishing). A highly enriched text for serious Delphi and 32-bit developers.

• Speaker, 1995 Borland Developer's Conference, San Diego. On "Generating world maps" and "Migrating Basic to Delphi".

• Participant, Microsoft Summer Camp 95. Microsoft gathered together some of the nation's foremost computer nerds together in one spot for several days to talk about common issues.

• Application Developer/Consultant for Corporate Software, Inc., (now, Stream, Inc.; formerly Phoenix Systems, Inc.)) Arlington VA where, among other things I helped put together budgets for the Executive Office of the President and other application development endeavors.

• Systems Analyst for Systems Exploration Inc. (San Diego, CA) where I worked on a variety of research and development projects for Navy and Defense laboratories.

Education

• MacArthur High School, Irving, TX
• BS (Math), Sul Ross State University, Alpine, TX
• MSSM (Systems Management) University of Southern California
  
  
• MS (Systems Science) University of California at San Diego

E-mail