Kevin Yeandel’s Random Access Memory

Because I work as a contractor (Documentum for the past 11 years) for many companies I often find that my ‘new colleagues’ are curious and they Google me.. well, good luck and good reading.

I keep a blog for me. Not for anyone else. I often forget how to do things because much of my knowledge is spread across so many things. I can go for 6 months not touching one of the Nix’s and forget how to do something so I look up here. I am currently growing a server farm for rendering animations in Blender and each server must be the same as the next. I pop up to my own blog to find out how to do something that I did before.

If you didn’t fathom it already, evidentally I’m in IT – it pays the bills but gets in the way of me making millions (that’s my excuse) because I don’t focus on the things in my life which involve metalworking and microelectronics. I’m a bit of an inventor you see. I like writing code for microchips and interfacing them to the PC via TCP/IP (not USB for various reasons including portability and requirements). My trade is actually electronics but broke away from that as a career in 1990. In 1997 I started writing a book. I intend to finish it in the next year or so. The rest of the time I do stuff with Documentum: Build and maintain systems, input to the design, currently working for IBM with a good friend at one of their client sites. It’s all AIX and a migration from Solaris. The customer is a pharmaceutical and the system there is probably the most stable and brilliant Documentum installations I have seen in the past 10 years. But it’s reaching end of life for reasons of support and performance. The migration places the new installation on bigger and virtual AIX hardware.  All good fun.

I moved into Computers and found Documentum in 1997. In 2001 I took a six week break from that to do my airline training before I got too old. I terminated this as a result of 9/11 – not sure what the future held for pilots at the time… and decided to go back into IT. I live to fly and have a Piper Aztec twin engined plane which is hangared and needs to be flown. Time and money prevent this currently but I am working on that.

A few years back I was 80% towards being given £250,000 by venture capitalists for a flight simulator design. I’m still fighting for VC and recently patented something.While 4 of the 5 people agreed there was one person who was neutral. It was presented by me a first time then the second time by a university/business school but both times the same person sat on the fence which is a shame because it had some very unique selling points and could be used for military applications. The electronics in it are being used by me for another project and is based on a protocol I developed was similar to the MMX512 used for theatrical applications but this one is smarter and written in C now embedded in microchips. All off this talks back to an open source free TCP stack on a chip from Microchip.com and addressable via http.

Currently working on a interface to one of my electronics projects written in OpenLaszlo with REST WebServices and an Apache Open Derby Database back end, as well as setting up a rendering farm for my Blender projects… not enough cores by far yet and a huge monthly electricity bill.

I use this blog site to grumble – mainly about faceless corporations who treat customers like dirt. People who I find dispicable get named here. Nobody has sued me yet, mostly because I tell the truth.

And when you are googling me you will see things about me and my antics as Simon Cowell, judging music competitions for which I got paid a fair amoung and mingled with some of the stars. Returning to my desk after a stint at ITV reminds me how mundain real life is but thats the way it is. I had my moment of fame in 2004 but am clearly destined for something else, something of a lower profile.