I don't believe I ever introduced myself to the Community, so here goes ...
Eric Marceau, now 70
B.Eng. (Mech. McGill '80)
Born in North Bay, Ontario; of French-Canadian descent; bilingual;
improved my French by reading large numbers of the Fleuve Noir
Anticipation series of paperbacks, especially those of the D.A.S.
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.A.S.>
(Département Anti-espionnage Scientifique) by K. H. Scheer,
which were translated from German to French.
Avid reader of SciFi. Had 8 file boxes full of English SciFi books at
one point. I have since managed to harvest equivalents for all
cherished items as PDF, and many of those as EPUBs as well. Only
lately made the decision to migrate to fully EPUBs, having begun
to massage my book files to my preferred styling using a combination
of tools that include Calibre and Sigil to create my own EPUBs, only
after having worked thru the painful process of converding PDFs
for 7 cherished Asimov books to plain text, massaged to eliminate
any inconsistencies in format or special character usage, inline and
between chapter segments, defining my own set of "tag strings"
for Awk processing to reformat into HTML as prep for EPUBs.
I am very happy with the resulting files, but Calibre and Sigil will
absolutely make future conversions immensely simpler. That's
on the reading side. As for the Movies side, i was an avid fan of
movies relating to conflict and war. My favourite ones were
"We Were Soldiers", "Master and Commander", "Glory",
"Last of the Mohicans", "Last Samurai" and an obscure French
movie about Algerian soldiers fighting for France in Northern
Africa during WWII. I could go on about many other movies of
various types, but this is not the forum for that. I've read a rare
few non-fiction books, mostly by people who were professional
soldiers, about war, conflict or strategy.
My current online activities are mostly related to volunteer online
contributions of support, previously at the now "archived" (frozen)
site for Ubuntu MATE Discourse
<https://ubuntu-mate.community/u/ericmarceau/summary>, and continuing
with the "migrated"
Community which followed my lead to the unofficial new home for
active users at linuxcommunity.io
<https://linuxcommunity.io/u/ericmarceau/summary>. I've been following
the Ottawa
mailing list to keep a pulse on things around here, and to hopefully
share my observations and views, where I feel they might find an
receptive audience.
It is highly unlikely that I would see myself joining those attending
the monthly dinner meets, but would welcome being able to
access any presentation files that could be made available to the
Community/Membership.
My home computer is a rig that was home-built by my younger
brother who understands PC hardware a lot more than myself,
having programmed as a contractor for a major provider to DND.
My desktop is Ubuntu MATE (of course), and my box has only
4GB RAM, 500GB disk for testing, 2TB disk for my important
stuff, and 4TB external Western-Digital OneBook USB drive for
backups, performed using rsync, using backup script available
here
<https://github.com/ericmarceau-rogers/HomeBase_Oasis/blob/master/quickRSYNC.sh>.
My industrial experience is as follows:
Worked at Pratt & Whitney, Montreal, QC start 1980
- manufacturing (CNC) process development (Catia 3D)
- 5-axis CNC of blisks
- metropolitain-scale DNC link for live block-transfer machining
- self-taught IBM 360 JCL to avoid relying on other departments
for my necessary report generation and NC program outputs
Worked at Nortel, London, ON start 1984
- mechanical design of plastic housings for telsets (Unity Plus)
- CAD/CAM Systems Engineer, Divisional Prime
- sole support for Graftek GMS, Pro/ENGINEER, AutoCAD, CADKEY
- responsible for technical decision-making regarding choice of hardware,
configurations and customization of tablet "templates" and "Agile"
language
programming for user-guided programs doing auto-build of selected
geometry
- sysadmin for the HP9000 model 550 mini with 2 large disk drives,
4 12-teminal muxes used to balance load of 12 graphics terminal
- wrote FORTRAN, Pascal, Agile, C and Shell programs to support various
design activities, along with a "homebuilt" workflow for Design file
handoff, approval and transfer between functions, departments and
outside contract machine-shops
Worked at Nortel, Brampton, ON start 1994
- IS Development Engineer, Design-to-Manufacturing, Corporate IT
- member of DVM Development/Operations team
- prime developer for the export conversions from various CAD formats
and support of ongoing operations performing those conversions and
mirroring
Worked at Nortel, Ottawa, ON start 1997
- continuing role at other location
- prime developer for migration and rationalization of conversion tools,
and
consolidation of operations from multiple older dedicated HP workstation
platforms to single HP server platform
Worked at CSC, Ottawa, ON start 2001
- outsourced as primary resource for transitioning of previous functions to
outsourcing provider organization
Worked at Millenium 1 Solutions, Ottawa, ON start 2008
- progression from frontline support for PC MasterCard
to Senior Support, also tasked for French Executive Customer Care
until I retired
As can be seen above, when Nortel "tanked" starting in 2003, I found myself
let go by the outsourcer, and struggled to find new employment in my own
field. I pursued and obtained my HRM Certificate from Algonguin College,
hoping that would open doors to a new career, but that did not happen. So,
the Call Centre approach was the lifeline of last-resort, but I made it
work.
... and there you have it!
🙂