User:Ydhirsch

Doug Hirsch

Summary: A son of an electrical engineer and a humanities instructor, as well as the 1960s Silicon Valley and Reform Judaism, Doug Hirsch is a semi-retired Internet technician, aircraft dispatcher and recently unretired project manager. He identifies as a gay male American Reform Jew, an alumnus of Harvard, Suffolk, the Advocate Experience, the est training and Internet pioneer BBN, as well as an international member of the Saint Kilda Football Club. He graduated from the same high school as Steve Jobs and dropped out of the same college as Bill Gates. College: Following a high school final semester abroad in Israel, where he fell in love with Sephardic liturgical music, he migrated to the Boston area for college. After a disastrous first year of college, Doug left Harvard and began the first phase of his career, electronics manufacturing quality control, followed by technician work on the pre-web Internet. In support of the ARPANET IMP developers at BBN, he learned to configure switches and routers, as well as to set up and administer UNIX minicomputers and workstations (BBN, Apollo, Sun), under Andrew G. Malis and John Zornig, running the DDN Testcell (23.0.0.0/8, as listed in RFC900). Zornig, from Yale, sent Doug back to college, "even if you have to go to the 'H' place." Thus, he returned to school and studied computer science at Harvard, under Harry R. Lewis, Anthony G. Oettinger and William H. Bossert, with frequent guest lectures in network technologies by senior BBN colleagues. He cross registered for a couple of courses at MIT, the focal point of his social life. Highlights at Harvard and MIT included three courses in music, three courses in Latin American history, a course in telephony, a course on the history of communication systems (Oettinger), an independent study toward an FAA ground instructor license (to teach for the Harvard Flying Club), dinner with Buckminster Fuller, a dinner invitation refused by Aron Copland, a couple of economics lectures by John Kenneth Galbraith and introductory physics with Vera Kistiakowsky. Memorable paper at Harvard: Mozart inverts role of aria in Marriage of Figaro.

Graduate: After belatedly earning his CS degree, Doug was both a build master, under Tony Michel, and the engineer "shipped in the box" with network management systems, to do the integration work with customers. A few years later, Doug was involved in the deployment engineering of the Defense Simulation Internet, which included a secured intercontinental video conference system. Doug's turf included racks deployed to the Pentagon itself, though they were installed by technicians with higher security clearances. System integration efforts led to agile project management skills before the Agile movement was invented.

Volunteerism and MBA: Volunteer work with a synagogue board (Congregation Betenu, Amherst NH, where he created their first web site), a condo board, Civil Air Patrol, the Gay Pilots Association, Boston Leather Knights and the community advisory boards of Fenway Community Health Research Institute and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network fleshed out the application to study for an MBA. Support from manager Bill Conaway at GTE Internetworking led to funding for Doug through an executive MBA at Suffolk University. His MBA was highlighted by regional business seminars at IESE in Barcelona and Catholic University in Buenos Aires, as well as the joy of learning to ski at Sunday River. Surprising and memorable lessons: Finance professor: "I never make an important decision when I'm tired, hungry or lonely";  US Embassy economic attache (Buenos Aires) on best way to learn languages: "Are you married?  Pillow talk!" Memorable paper at Suffolk: Judge Jackson convicts Microsoft of illegal monopoly behavior -- reflections from a legal monopolist.

Airline: After being merged into GTE (the legal telecom monopoly) and spun out from the Verizon merger into fascinating, but doomed Internet service provider Genuity, the post-Y2K dot bust put Doug and thousands of his colleagues overboard. This led to Doug's pursuit of an FAA dispatcher license atop his FAA private pilot and ground instructor licenses. Moving to northern Virginia, he worked for three years as a dispatcher with Colgan Air, planning and supervising regional Beech 1900 and Saab 340 flights for US Airways, Continental and United Airlines. In addition to the annual license obligation to jumpseat in the aircraft being dispatched, Doug loved using jumpseat privileges to shuttle across the country, keeping in touch with friends, family and old colleagues, thereby finding new opportunities.

PM: One of his inspirations to pursue the MBA was observation of the BBN program manager running the US Army Europe UTACCS program subcontract under prime TRW. That TRW division later became part of Northrop Grumman, where, almost twenty years later, in a third tour of duty with BBN, Doug was deployed as the Los Angeles area on-site program manager for the US Army FCS program.

Sunset: Heading toward career sunset, Doug has picked up certifications to recognize areas of knowledge previously demonstrated, such as the Project Management Institute PMP and the Cisco CCNA. Residing abeam the port of Los Angeles, Doug is currently supporting a UC Berkeley Haas School of Business research team as project manager. On the side, he is studying taxes for seasonal retirement employment, while thinking about how to promote internship and mentorship programs, as well as the concept of a Gay Community College. Doug theorizes that having had a Gay Community College would have better prepared him both to make the most of college and to have an easier time growing into his adult identity.

Earthling: Doug loves to travel, both virtually and in reality, keeping in touch with friends across the US, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Israel and Switzerland. When he can, he vacations around Melbourne, where he barracks for Saint Kilda and delights in different dialects of English. On at least a weekly basis, he explores the world in FSX (Microsoft Flight Simulator circa 2010), splitting time among a simulated Diamond DA42, stock Airbus 321, Boeing 737 and 747. Doug contributes raw data to Flightradar24 and occasional summarizations to Wikipedia. Always geographically oriented, Doug's obligatory question is reliably "Where?!", though duties as a project manager lead to "When?" and "How?"

Favorite creators: His library is a garden of ideas. Doug embraces books, e-books and audio books, records, CDs and mp3s, videotapes, laserdiscs, DVDs and mp4s.
 * actors: Tom Hanks, Sidney Poitier, Katharine Hepburn, John Clarke, Brian Dawe, Sean Connory, Diana Rigg
 * American fiction: Armistead Maupin
 * animation: Karen Aqua
 * Australian fiction: Geoffrey McGeachin
 * aviation: Mark Vanhoenacker
 * biography and history: Samuel Eliot Morison, Bill Bryson, Oliver Sacks, Walter Isaacson, Jacob Bronowski
 * classical music, earlier: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Mozart, Schubert, Vivaldi
 * classical music, 20thC: Adams (Harmonium), Bartok, Berio (Sinfonia), Britten, Copland, Corigliano, Debussy, Faure, Gorecki, Hindemith, Martinu, Poulenc, Prokofiev, Reich (18 Musicians), Respighi, Rodrigo, Satie, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Tippett (Mask of Time), Villa-Lobos, Walton
 * choreographers: Gerald Arpino, Michael Smuin
 * current events: David Brooks (NY Times)
 * film director: Eytan Fox
 * football team: Saint Kilda Saints
 * gay romance: Daryl Banner, Keira Andrews, Rachel Reid, Sean Ashcroft
 * historical fiction: Eric Flint
 * jazz: Eberhard Weber, McCoy Tyner, Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett, Ralph Towner, Vince Guaraldi, Bahama Soul Club, Miles Davis, Ken Field, Bob James, Wayne Shorter, Charlie Mingus
 * Jewish American fiction: Philip Roth, Faye Kellerman
 * Israeli music: HaKaveret, Hadag Nahash, Naomi Shemer
 * music producer: Manfred Eicher (ECM Records)
 * obscure films: Meeting Venus, Lion in Winter, Thank You For Smoking, The Dish
 * opera: Bizet, Messiaen (St Francis), Verdi, Wagner, Jake Heggie (Moby-Dick)
 * popular music: Beatles, Santana, Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, Chicago, Blood Sweat & Tears, Yes, Harvey Sutherland (I want it all)
 * sci-fi: Arthur C. Clark, Leo Szilard
 * sci-fi romance and politics: Lois McMaster Bujold (VorKosigan series), Robert Heinlein (Moon is a Harsh Mistress)
 * television: John Clarke, Jacob Bronowski, Bill Moyers, McNeil-Lehrer, Yes Minister
 * YouTube: Asianometry, Mikey McBryan, Enrico Tartarotti, speedtapefilms, RobWords, Adam Neely, Wendover Productions

Ydhirsch (talk) 05:53, 10 November 2023 (UTC)