User:Digimark

About Me

My name is Gary Goldberg and I operate Digital Marketing (DigiMark), an Internet systems and network management consultancy. From 1994 to 2002 DigiMark was successful and prosperous as an Internet presence provider, but the combination of the dot-com bust and an aborted effort to expand our operations through a venture capital-seeking partnership led me to downsize and consolidate into managed services and contracting.

I was born June 4th, 1965 in Columbus, Ohio. My parents were Sandy and Shelly Goldberg of Columbia Maryland, Akron Ohio and Knoxville Tennessee. My mother passed away in 2002 and my father passed away in 2005; they are buried together in a cemetary in Knoxville. I have a twin brother, Ron, who lives in Catonsville, Maryland with his wife and four children, a younger sister Marla (married with a son, Daniel), and my Aunt Norma and Uncle Woody Wells in Grove City, Ohio. I grew up in Falls Church and Springfield, Virginia and Columbia, Maryland.

My wife is Robin, a systems analyst for the United States Census Bureau and we have two children, Jacob (b. 1999) and Joshua (b. 2001). We live in a nice multi-level home in Bowie, Maryland and have hopes to continue to make improvements to it and to travel whenever time and money allow. I used to drive a wonderful 1999 Mercedes-Benz M-Class truck which I loved but it was killed in an accident in March, 2006 and now I drive a nice but boring Honda minivan.

My Formal Education

I attended and graduated 33rd in my class from Wilde Lake High School in Columbia, Maryland.

I've earned a bachelor of science degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland Baltimore County where I graduated with honors. I started the program after leaving high school in 1983 but took until 2000 to complete while I worked full-time.

The Census Bureau

I've worked on numerous projects during my six years at the United States Census Bureau in Suitland, Maryland (1988 to 1994), including developing a VAX/VMS disk drive allocation and management software package using the VMS Screen Management Library, co-managing the same VAX/VMS Economic division network, spending a year learning about systems integration from a Census mentor and migrating into a full time Internet systems manager and evangelist within the Census Bureau. For our efforts my team received several awards, including Vice President Al Gore's Hammer award for reinventing the government. My last project for the Bureau involved researching methods of data and metadata retention and archiving for long-term storage, a subject with which I still remain actively involved. I left the Bureau in 1994 to manage DigiMark full-time.

DigiMark

With over five hundred DigiMark clients, I've worked on some pretty amazing projects over the last decade.

• I installed and maintained a ten-server language translation cluster for Globalink, subsequently absorbed into Lernout & Hauspie.
• For over ten years, I've served as the technical contractor and network manager for a web design company with hundreds of national embassy websites, some of whom were at war with each other.
• I continue to maintain the infrastructure and solve problems for a California sporting goods retail company.
• I've provided network management and research assistance for a Japanese media atelier.
• I've had contracts to help divisions of Starbucks Coffee, Sony USA, US West and other large companies establish and maintain project-specific websites, and kept companies in Japan, England, Italy, the Caribbean and the Kingdom of Bahrain online and communicating.
• I've converted video between different compression formats and managed the websites for a Los Angeles music video director and a Northern Virginia-based business television production company.
• I managed the website of a New York credit union and kept it online and serving customers when the bank's headquarters were abandoned on 9/11.
• I've installed, secured and operated a confidential investment portfolio access website for a New York capital fund.

In all of these projects and in many more, I've consulted with clients. I've listened to their needs, and made my recommendations --

• I've developed, implemented, secured, backed-up and managed their websites...
• Their online applications...
• Their internal and external corporate email, mailing list and groupware-based Internet communications...
• ...using COTS and FOSS hardware and software solutions.
• More than a few times I've helped them recover from disasters both operational and maliciously-induced.
• And I provide great documentation.

My brother Ron and I spent most of 2000 working to take DigiMark to the next level - venture capital support. Working together with fourteen sales and marketing professionals, two new partners and a top-shelf attorney from Greenberg Traurig we pulled togther some amazing presentations and an ambitious business plan, but sadly the deal fell apart at the last moment and left DigiMark with significant debt and reduced opportunities, which took a few years to clear up.

I've met and worked with many interesting and motivated people over the years. Through all of it I learned how to run a company, keep the books, hire and fire people and (I'm proud to say) I've always provided high-quality, professional work, given more than was expected by my clients and kept DigiMark operating with a profit.

Personal Interests

In my personal life I have many interests (some more serious than others) including photography, drive-in movie theaters, digital video, collecting civil defense memorabilia, playing with gadgets and worrying about my children's safety and future. My parents tried to raise me Jewish but we only practiced it when it was expected of us or when my parents felt guilty (usually Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Hannukah). However I've been an reluctant atheist for most of my adult life. My personal heroes are the Mahatma Gandhi, scientist Carl Sagan and actor/comedian Steve Martin.

I used to read science fiction, Tom Clancy-type technical spy thrillers and history books voraciously but seldom read more than Internet news these days. My favorite movies are Heat (film) and Strange Days (film). I love watching SpongeBob with my sons, DIY and HGTV network shows and the Stargate series. I like many different musicians and musical genres; As of 2006 my favorite classical work is Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, my favorite singer/lyricists are Dido and Death Cab for Cutie and I've bought and used just about every MP3 player/encoder device and software that has been produced. I had two Empeg car computers (my Mark 1 Empeg was #257 to be hand-made), the first generation iPod (ordered on the day it was announced) and the first and second Diamond Rio players. One of the Rios is still connected to my set of drive-in speakers and it plays intermission clips when you push the play button. I've been an Apple Macintosh person since purchasing a Mac SE in 1987, and since them I've had a IIcx, Quadra 840AV, PowerMac 8500AV, PowerBook 5300c, many homebrew white box PCs, several Sony PictureBook handheld computers, two Dell Inspiron notebooks, a PowerMac G4 Cube, PowerMac G4 Quicksilver, 15" Titanium PowerBook, 12" Aluminum PowerBook, Intel Core Duo Mac mini and a 2.66Ghz Mac Pro. I still have the last three, along with two Shuttle small-form-factor PCs, four Linux and Windows servers, a whole passel of CRT and flat panel monitors, networking gear, hard drives, hundreds of PCI cards, three robotic tape jukeboxes, miles of expensive cables and hundreds upon hundreds of software packages.

I have been the founder and principal landlord for the Simpsons Archive website and continue to support it, although I haven't been involved with the content and direction of the site for many years.

Contacting Me

I'm currently working from my home and I can be reached by through my website DigiMark, telephone at 301/249-6501 or by email at og@digimark.net.