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I am a business analyst with a large computer software and outsourcing company. My specialty is designing production management software for the oil and gas industry.
I have two university degrees, in chemistry and computer science, and professional certificates in petroleum production accounting, and petroleum contract and land administration, among others.
I grew up in a very different world. It was the (sort of) wild west. I learned to shoot a gun at six, and bought my own rifle at eight. My first school was a one-room country school with an outhouse out back and hot and cold running mice inside. (They later turned it into a museum). Then they struck oil and the oil companies built a pipeline right past our little school. Little did we know how it would affect our lives.
Over the years, I have worked for oil and software companies in Canada and the U.S., plus a brief but interesting stint in the U.K.
I have worked on a research project in the Athabasca Oil Sands (a fireflood project where my software warned them when the producing wells were about to catch fire). I helped designed a safety shutdown system for a poisonous gas field near a major city that would shut down the whole gas field if the poison gas got loose (it worked perfectly well when the compressor building blew up). I helped design an ice flow monitoring system that predicted when a billion dollar drilling platform in the Arctic Ocean would be crushed by ice. I have worked in a lot of remote places with really bad roads and really cold winters. I have also worked in Houston, which is the other extreme.
As my moniker would suggest, I spend most of my spare time at my place in the Rocky Mountains. In this case, the Canadian Rockies as distinct from the American Rockies. (For details on how they differ, see Handbook of the Canadian Rockies by Ben Gadd). I'm active in the Alpine Club of Canada, but mostly I do backcountry skiing rather than climbing. When I'm skiing, I carry a transceiver because of the avalanches and sometimes a rope because of the glaciers. I'm happily married but my wife goes places I don't dare because I don't ski or climb as well as her.
I have a 9000 foot mountain behind my house I can be at the top of in three hours. I have grizzly bears in my back yard, and elk roaming the street because the woods are full of wolves. I carry bear spray a lot because a grizzly killed a jogger on a golf course last year, and a cougar picked off a cross country skier a couple of years before (the cougars were hungry because the wolves were eating all the elk). I've shot myself three times with the bear spray so I can confirm that it has no permanent effects, but it does bring tears to your eyes. Thank goodness I don't own a gun anymore. RockyMtnGuy 11:50, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
