Jason E. Sweat's weblog

I mentioned in the Part 2 about my wife Vicki and my daughter Madeline. On Christmas Eve, 2001, my son Caleb James Sweat was born.

Madeline is quite a little lady. She will be entering the sixth grade at Riverdale Heights Elementary. She will be taking her temporary Black Belt test on the day of the reunion (Aug 9th) and she is doing very well on the Pleasant Valley Stingrays Swim Team. I think it is interesting that her strengths and weaknesses in swimming stroke were the same as mine when I swam on the Coronado High School swim team. She does very well academically. She has taken the BESTS tests the past two years, which are an 8th grade level aptitude test in which she places above the 90th percentile. She also was selected as one of four students from the 5th grade to represent the school at the Ecomeet, in which Riverdale Heights won. Madeline volunteers at the local family museum and the library.

Caleb loves to follow in his big sisters footsteps. He is on both the swim team, and will be testing for his blue belt in Taekwondo on the ninth. He will be starting 1st grade at Riverdale Heights, and is big time into Super Heroes, video games and Webkinz.

Vicki stays home to take care of the kids, and during the school year is a volunteer in the classroom. She spends much of her time ferrying kids to various activities, and is a great cook.

Our family enjoys going on vacation together. Some of our best adventures have been in Acapulco Mexico, where we have purchased a vacation time share and have returned several times. We have also taken the kids to the Bahamas, Myrtle Beach, Orlando and the Wisconsin Dells over the past couple of years.

Last summer we did quite a bit of camping, but that has not seemed to fit into our packed schedule this summer. The weather has not treated us so well this summer either, we lost a rather large tree in our back yard due to the tremendous rain and wind storms we have been having. The flooding here in the Midwest has not affected us directly, other than our sump pump turned on for the first time this year.

Personally, I enjoy doing martial arts as my main “outside of work” activity. About two months before Caleb was born, I discovered an Aikido dojo here in the quad cities. I decide to do one night a week (not actually a popular decision at the time, if you can imagine). About three years later, the landlord was disappointed in not having been paid rent, and the dojo shut down. In August 2005, Vicki located a Taekwondo program through the YMCA which Madeline joined. I began to come and participate in class along with her. In March of 2006, Caleb decided he was old enough to join, but that was going to double our monthly payment to $60 per month. In her usual cost saving maneuver, Vicki located another Taekwondo Dojang, Chung Kim’s Blackbelt Academy which we could pay $75 per month for me and the kids on a family plan. I was especially attracted to this because they had three black belt instructors for a class of ~12-15 “little tigers” (class age 4-7) which would give Caleb a lot more individual instruction and attention. The overall classes focused more on discipline and proper form, which I liked better than the more “open” style we had been instructed in before, and they had a Hapkiye class (Hapkido but the “ye” means supplemental art instead of “do” meaning path, showing this was and additional art as part of our Taekwondo curriculum, not the main art we are studying). Hapkido is the Korean version of Aikido, and is a soft style martial art in contrast with the hard style of TKD itself. We usually do Monday and Wednesday evening TKD classes, and the kids do TKD when I do Hapkiye on Friday evening. I also do Hapkiye and the TKD Blackbelt classes on Saturday mornings.

I began to watch the UFC and various other Mixed Martial Arts shows on TV for entertainment. I noticed a trend where it seemed like every third or fourth fighter was announced as being from “Bettendorf, Iowa”. Well Bettendorf is a town of 20,000, so something was going on. It turns out that Pat Miletich, former UFC lightweight champion, runs a gym and training camp for MMA fighters here. Last summer I went to get a haircut and my barber had closed up shop temporarily. I remember that the gym was just a block away so I stopped in to visit. Pat was there and showed me around the facilities, and talked with me for 15 minutes or so. Later that evening, I met my boss at a local resturant for dinner. About half way through out meal, Pat walked in and sat down at the table next to us. His dinner guests never showed up, so we invited him over to our table and had a nice conversation. I decided to take a week trial and eventually signed up for a membership. I do the 5am Ultifit on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings. On Wednesday and Friday mornings, I stay at 6am and do basic kickboxing. On Monday and Wednesday evenings, I attend Rodrigo Uzeda’s Bazillion Ju-Jitsu classes. These classes are right after the advanced MMA classes, so it is kind of fun to walk in as see Pat Miletich, Jens Pulver, Tim Silvia, Cory Hill, Ben Rothwell and many others working out.

Anyway, that is a brief summary of 20 years of my life. Even though I can’t attend the reunion, I hope I will run into some of my former classmates in cyberspace.

One day at Neural, I received a telephone call from a recruiter who asked me if I would be interested in leading a project to replace legacy systems at “A Fortune 500 Company within 45 minute commute of you”. I say “ok, who is it?” and she revealed it was Alcoa. I laughed and said I know a vice-president of Alcoa, to which I got a “sure you do” kind of response. After I hung up from her, I called Wendy Winge, who was the IT project manager I had worked with most closely at North Star Steel, who had followed Mike Coleman over to Alcoa. Mike had been the president of North Star Steel, and joined Alcoa to run the Ridged Packaging Division and was a VP of Alcoa as a whole. Mike called me back later that afternoon and said he was going to call John Collins, the president of the Mill Products division where I was looking at the job, and he was going to instruct him to “do whatever it took to get me on board”. The next day the recruiter called back and said “I don’t know what happened, but they are very eager to get your resume, you have to get it over to me right away”.

I joined Alcoa Mill Products in Bettendorf Iowa in July of 1999. I was a Project Leader, and my first job was the installation of a Customer Relationship Management system. When I joined, the business had already identified the need, and we were going through a vendor selection process. We ended up selecting Siebel, and we went live with our system in March 2000, delivering the project on time and $500,000 under budget.

My role continued to be associated with these commercial systems. I facilitated maintenance and enhancement of this CRM tool, as well as AlcoaDirect, our custom extranet solution for our customers, and various intranet applications. In January 2005, I moved to the commercial side of the business and became the Manager of eBusiness/Commercial Systems, which basically meant keep doing all of the IT work for these systems, but now be responsible for sponsoring and guiding strategy with them as well. In August 2007, my supervisor departed to join John Deere, and my role moved back into the IT department, though my title and responsibilities remain the same.

One significant thing which happened during this time frame was my introduction to the web development language PHP. During my tenure at Neural Application Corporation, I participated in an investment club called the Pentecrest Investment Club, and I continued to pursue my personal interest in Stock Options trading, and eventually formed a partnership with some members of my investment club, family, friends and work associates. This partnership was called “Sweat Equity Investments” and I managed the options trades for the group. I originally tracked the trades in an Access database, and used a report to generate static web pages which I published as the monthly accounting. I was familiar with Microsoft SQL server and ASP pages from work experience, but I did not want to pay for the license for a Windows server setup at home. I talked to my UNIX administrator, Charles Fisher, and he pointed me in the direction of the LAMP stack. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, Mysql and PHP, though I initially used Sybase for the easy of transitioning from Microsoft SQL.

Once I had this capability, I rewrote our accounting software and made a secured website where each partner could log in, review their account, and get graphs of their account history. Since I was using all open source software which I did not have to pay for, I felt I owed something back to the community which had provided these tools, so I began to write articles about the work I was doing. Some of these were published on the Zend website, and in particular a tutorial on using JpGraph attracted the attention of a publisher named Wrox. They wanted to write a book on graphics in PHP, and I ended up writing two chapters on charting data. Two weeks after I received the two preliminary copies of the book, the parent company of Wrox went bankrupt and I never received a penny for the 1/3 of the PHP Graphics Handbook.

The cut out about half of the material I had written, so I was later able to tweak that material into a series of article for PHP Architect magazine. I began attending conferences and presenting on various PHP topics, and later wrote my second book PHP|Architect’s Guide to PHP Design Patterns.

At this point and time, PHP is a small fraction of my professional work at Alcoa, but I do some consulting work on the side to keep myself engaged (and I love it, it is fun for me).

Continued…

My father, whom most people from Coronado in my class would remember as Mr. Sweat, the Media Specialist on the library staff, also sold grade book software for the computer. He took a support call from a teacher in Bluegrass Iowa, but it was actually that teacher future son-in-law, who was local computer technical support for her and in conversing with my dad, mention he was doing research on Artificial Neural Networks. My dad said “Hey, that is what my son is researching too” and on the winter break of my senior year, I arrange some time to visit their main research project at North Star Steel in Wilton Iowa, which was 30 miles down the road from my grandparent’s house in Silvis, Illinois. I found it fascinating, but at that time was intending to continue going to graduate school.

Mulling things over, I decided that perhaps it would be good to earn a bit of money for a year or two, pay off some student loans, and then go back to school after that (16 years later…never happened). During spring break I went back and did a second interview, and two days before graduation I received and acceptance letter from Milltech – HOH, a tiny engineering firm in Iowa of which I was the 12th employee. I moved back to Davenport Iowa, got an apartment, and we worked in a little office on top of a Chinese restaurant in Walnut Center. We were building process control systems for mini-mill in the steel industry.

The following year, the company changed its name to Neural Applications Corporation, and moved the University of Iowa’s Oakdale Research Campus, a business incubator for the university in Coralville Iowa. We spent a year or so in the basement of one of the campus buildings, and then eventually built our own building and moved into it.

I had purchased a condo in Iowa City, and lived next door to Laura Suppel, whose family ran La Casa, a Mexican restaurant in Iowa City. Her best friend was Vicki Casey, whom I met at a few parties at her house. We eventually began dating, and later sold both of our houses and moved in together into a split level house from the 70’s on the east side of Iowa City. He father passed away, and we had our daughter Madeline Moira Sweat, who was born on February 1st, 1997.

Vicki is a twin, her brother Brad is a school teacher, and a basketball coach and referee in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There is a younger set of twin brothers, Bret who lives in Ohio, and Bart who lives in Iowa City. Their youngest of 3 kids was Abe, born on March 1st, 1997 exactly one month after Madeline.

The work I performed was always in the steel industry. I changed from installing and configuring the control systems, to managing the research and development projects for new control systems on different pieces of equipment. There were several years where I was on the road 3-4 weeks a month, and it was actually quite amazing that I was able to meet my wife at all .

We were looking for additional ways to apply the technologies we were using. On aspect of them was they could learn to recognize patterns in large amounts of data. We were therefore looking for problems where there was lots of data and a poorly understood underlying process. The answer to this search was the stock market, and we began to use neural networks to assess performance of stocks. This lead the company to purchase a stock market oriented portal called stockpoint.com, which was later acquired through a series of transactions and is now CBS Marketwatch. By the time I left, I was the 6th most tenured employee at a firm of 100 people.

Towards the end of my work at Neural, I was designing ASP pages which looked at data collected from PLCs (Programmable Logic Controllers) and stored in a SQL Server database. I really enjoyed this web work and it certainly has continued to play a role in my life.

Six weeks before I left, the metals portion of the company was acquired by a company called Systems Alternative, Inc. and the rest of Neural continued on in its financial sector focus. I heard the Neural acquired portion of the business was shut down one year later, so my decision to leave was on good footing for many reasons.

Continued…

This year is my 20th high school reunion. I was looking forward to this, and had been searching the internet for when it was going to happen all last fall and winter. Late this spring a postcard arrived with the date, which I looked at and to quote Han Solo “I’ve got a bad feeling about this”. The date was August 9th, and my kids head back to school on August 13th. To top it off, this was one of three black belt testing dates per year for our school, and I am ready to test, and my best friend from high school already had plans to see a Cubs game in Chicago on that date, and to stop here and visit afterwards. All in all, the stars seem to have aligned against me attending the reunion.

None the less, the spirit to reconnect is in me as it is with many others. Facebook has turned out to be a blessing in this way, allowing me to reconnect with some of those long lost souls by reaching out across the internet. If you have a facebook account, look me up.

These blog posts are a summary of twenty years of my life since high school, for anyone who cares. It may be mostly boring drivel that nobody is interested in reading, but that is what blogs on the internet are for, right 😉 This will of course be the “resume” version of my life, I won’t subject you to the real crappy parts you don’t want to read anyway, just the highlights to give you a flavor.

Part 1 of 4 – The College Years

After high school, I attended Colordao State University. I graduated in four years with a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration. I had concentrations in Finance & Real Estate, and Computer Information Systems, and I had a minor in Mathematics. I was in the University Honors Program, and I did a Senior Honors Thesis titled “The Application of Neural Networks to the Forecasting of Economic Time Series Data”.

I spent two years in the dorms at CSU, and two more years in apartments there. Some people from Coronado who attended CSU with me were Teresa Parker (lived in the same dorm I did the first two years), Lisa Bailey (married Allen Wagner), Mark Stallings (roommate with me my second year in the dorms and first year of apartments) and Jeff Whitt (my roommate the last year of college).

I did funded undergraduate research on the same topic as my honors thesis, and the professor I did research with was Dr. John Snyder. He has a cabin up on a lake in Montana on Swan Lake, near the town of Big Fork; about 45 minutes drive south of the west entrance to Glacier National Park. He spent summers there, eventually retiring to the cabin, and I went to visit him there several times.

In addition to class work, I participated in numerous extracurricular activities. Besides the usual bar hopping, I was in a group called the Society for Creative Anachronism which did recreation of the medieval times including fighting, dancing and feasting. Four all four years at CSU, I was in the CSU Ki – Aikido Club, studying the Japanese martial art of Aikido. I liked this, and took both levels of introduction to Self-Defense courses offered as PE credits as well. I joined Alpha Kappa Psi, a co-ed professional business fraternity.

Continued…