Jack is a retired computer systems professional, poet, writer. He engineered software systems for the US Defense Satellite industry; for government educational and management systems; He served 25 world airlines. He is a corporate educator and corporate training system developer. His career and avocational expeditions have spanned the globe. He speaks four languages. He writes poetry and music and does business in all four languages.
Jack began adult life as a homeless nomadic high school drop out.
He got a GED. In his evaluation in Navy boot camp the Navy offered to send Jack to the university of his choice in exchange for an additional two years as a Naval officer. Jack said he was not ready for school. So on leaving boot camp Jack got his orders. GO TO SCHOOL. In his first year in the Navy he was educated at one of the Navy’s best schools in the critical rating of Communications Specialist learning: electricity, electronics, transmitters, receivers, morse code, electronic communications and so on. Jack said his Navy training was equal to a college education.
In his last two years of four for the Navy he did his Navy job and completed two years of college independently. He penultimately completed eight years of undergraduate study because he wanted to major in everything. Ultimately he had to choose between two paths: Psychology or Computer Science. He chose the latter.
As a hybrid software engineer / corporate educator Jack singlehandedly created the world’s greatest corporate education system. When he says this he is not bragging. He is just being honest. He designed it. He programmed it. He implemented it. He maintained it and managed it for the world’s biggest travel reservation system, Amadeus Global Travel in Bavaria. The system served the very high tech Amadeus multinational corporation and its consortium airlines.
Independently, Jack wrote a book: Driven to Perfection, From Road Rage to Road Sage. The book became a driver school tool. That became a self improvement course when Jack employed the driver exercises as metaphors for self improvement elements. Jack concluded that if he could create the greatest corporate education system then he could create the greatest self improvement system.
Jack began 2010 building a corporation for a Green Burial operation. He studied then current approaches to business models as well as state and local laws and regulations. He developed operational software for the entire operation as well as financial operations plus a couple green burial websites to interface with the public world. Typically, Jack included innovations that would make the company more profitable, benefitted plot owners and demonstrated the attraction of novel, outside the box innovation
Later, jack wrote what he calls the most important nonfiction book of the opening decade of the 21st century. The title is PSYCHO PATHS and CON TRAILS. The book describes life as two groups of people:
- a class populated with psychopaths whose mission is to profit from the other class by whatever means best fitting the goal no matter any deleterious effect on anyone or anything
- a class populated by average humans trying to live life with a – normally unexamined list of conditioned paradigms on their backs. Freedom, the book declares, is attained by shifting detrimentally functioning paradigms into functionally improved ones.
Jack says the book PP&CT is more applicable today than it was in 2010.
In 2012 Jack published NINE ELEVENS, a novel that covers more than a thousand years of adventures of his Maya heroes whose mission was to go into all the world and spread the gospel of reason. This book began with Jack’s discovery that a trail through history of a particular date outlined a series of incredible/astounding events. Yup, that date just happened to be 9-11. The fictional date of the beginning of the novel, NINE ELEVENS, is 09/11/0911.
Jack’s current novel is entitled FEARLESSNESS FOUND. It is the story of an inventor mother and her inventor daughter and their team discovering the secret to fearlessness. And a lot more. Like they are the inventors of the world’s greatest paraglider with features certain security agencies want to mimic.
Jack spent most of his professional career working with software for 25 of the world’s greatest airlines. Only one of those was in the US. For many years Jack had no home, no country. He said his home was the software center of just about any world airline. He has touched down in 85 countries; expeditioned in some, worked in some, lived vigorously and lovingly and gratefully in all. When Jack wasn’t “home” he was usually off on an expedition enjoying one of his avocations. But, his preeminent avocation was cultural anthropology. Every culture he nested in was entered with the question, so how do they do it here; what is unique or different from the others.
He is a skier, sailor, SCUBA diver, aircraft pilot, paraglider pilot, hiker/climber and skater. Notably he sailed his windsurfer the entire length of Mediterranean Spain. He built his first sailboat from a four dollar blueprint. He has flown his paraglider in nine countries. Jack started his bucket list long ago. Before, in fact, he understood what the term means. His last bucket list item is to climb Mont Blanc and from the peak fly his paraglider down to the village of Chamonix. The item is on the list because once he had flown from the middle station halfway up Mont Blanc, the most rugged mountain in Europe, he knew he had to climb to the tip top and take off.
Jack planned a seven volume autobiography. To date he has finished the first volume. It is entitled MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS SEEN THROUGH THE POSSIBLE CAUSES OF MY BAD BACK. This exciting volume is hardly more than a hundred pages. A jam packed hundred pages of around the world adventures and short bits on how the adventures rounded out his philosophy. The second volume is to be published in the autumn of 2018. It is to be entitled Chickamauga Nickajack.
When Jack wasn’t on a contract for the government or an airline he liked to exercise his penchant for entrepreneurial efforts. These usually coincided with a need to exercise one of his avocations. For example, he would stake out a territory where he like to fly small aircraft. The selected area would be one with expensive estates. He would fly these and photograph estates. Then through his local representatives he would market various visual representations, even, as it turned out, cross stitch patterns.
When Jack retired he returned to California to catch up on it and spend some time enjoying what he called its “ample leg room.” He says he is the fittest septuagenarian he knows but still improving mentally and physically because of his interest in health and nutrition. His current project is reversing aging and establishing his dream company, innerprize. Jack conceived, developed, and managed Winward Ways publishing. He developed, maintained, hosted several public service web sites after retiring including a county arts council, some writer and artist groups and a presaged but premature cultural and event web site using a “you are the reporter” approach. He also created and maintain several poet facilitating websites. Jack wrote for several preview and review efforts. He created and led several poetry groups.
Jack hosted and maintained websites for local artists and poets as well as producing and publishing the work of local artists and poets.
Jack has published a number of his own nonfiction, fiction, biographical, musical, and poetry works including LOVE LETTUCE, WINE SAIL, LOOSE CANON [C A N O N], THE KNIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMASES. His novel in progress is entitled FEARLESSNESS FOUND.
Jack has and plays — more or less — 32 musical instruments. He is currently in love with the ukulele. He calls the baritone ukulele his little guitar. He loves to play flamenco, jazz, bluegrass and ballads.
Speaking of ukulele, Jack has found in his developing relationship with the ukulele that his guitar method works as well or better with the ukulele as it does with the guitar. A slight name change made the acronym sound somewhat better.
PIADGU (pronounce it as Pee Ahhd Gu) PLAY IN A DAY GUITAR UKELELE. Really? Yes, really. See a discussion of PIADGU elsewhere on this site.
Jack says the ability to see clearly, deeply, simply allows innovation to harness imagination. When Jack developed his corporate training system, TRACY, he incorporated two ideas that had never been applied to corporate training systems. They were simple. They were powerful. TRACY became the showcase tool of the world’s largest travel data system. Additionally, TRACY did what very few training systems in the world have done. It made money in a high volume transaction system environment where down time causes were system input to training scheduling and assessment.
Jack’s retired life has facilitated attention to long desired efforts, primarily writing. Work wise, he finally moved out of his charity internet efforts. He now focuses on this site where he can present what he creates. Jack managed and maintained sites for many poets, among them the twice world champion slam poet Buddy Wakefield and Bullhorn a site that carried the efforts of 150 high ranking poets in the slam arena. Later on, Buddy’s talent agency hired a programmer to build them a new web site. Just as he finished, he died of a heart attack. No one knew how to run the system. Buddy asked Jack to help them . Jack has been maintaining that site ever since, training their people in its use, resolving problems and building new features. In 2015 that talent agent began to phase itself out.
For the talent agency and others Jack has continually provided training and promotion packages. He normally uses CamStudio and Corel’s Video Studio Ultimate X8
Jack never cared for management chains … for himself. He has managed to manage himself into projects. His great joy is to see a project complete well. ‘Well’ involves, as well, the idea of WIN-WIN. Jack says, “if both sides don’t win what they wanted , it may as well be football. Greed games are juvenile.”
Education. Jack has eight years of undergraduate work. Though not directed through an approved academia path in his corporate educator function and other positions, Jack utilized his education provider companies in negotiations to keep copies of courses he bought from external providers and those he built in his own corporate laboratory to create and learn from a large volume of technical and management courses. The answer to the question, “Do you have a masters degree or PHD?” Jack responds, “I have much, much more.”
JxLxM – (ARR)