Hi, welcome to my website. Take a peek and let me know what you think.
As much as possible, I encourage you to comment on anything you see in this blog. I would very much like to know your experiences with anything that I’m blogging about.
Or if you like, drop me a line at my email marc@marc-bourassa.com.
I live here in the beautiful Southeastern United States with my wonderful wife, Michelle. No kids but we do have two cats.
This site
This site is intended to be an online collection of useful items, notes and memories. I wanted a place where I could store significant bits and pieces of my world and share them with folks.
Some articles in the blog itself are intended to explain or document interesting things that I’ve done or encountered.
Any interesting tools or information that I want to be able to quickly get at no matter where I am are also documented here also with the hope that they may be useful to others out there but primarily to jog *my* memory.
WishLists
If you’re looking to buy something for Marc, here are my wishlists 🙂 :
A donation in my name to any of the following organizations would be appreciated. Please do not donate in my name to other organizations without first talking to me. Thanks!
- Electronic Frontier Foundation (I’m forced to pay taxes to invade my own privacy, I choose to donate to those who would protect it)
- Freedom from Religion Foundation (Regardless of how you feel about religion, it needs to stay out of politics)
- Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe (These guys epitomize what it means to be a skeptic. Clear thinking, rational, and open to new information and criticism. The progress we could make if more folks were like this.)
- American Red Cross
- SETI’s Big Picture Science outreach podcast
- Public Radio (WABE)
- Astronomy Cast
- Wikipedia
If you don’t wish to support the organizations above or really want to get me a tangible item, I can always use:
- Anything from this list I maintain a list at Amazon.com
and let’s not forget my lovely wife Michelle’s Wish List
Really, who am I?
I believe in a good work-life balance. I enjoy what I do for a living – I love logic problems and the myriad challenges posed by programming computers – and think my coworkers would agree I’m pretty good at what I do.
Outside of work, I divide my time between my burgeoning interests in photography, astronomy and skepticism. I read, not as much as I’d like, but enough to keep me happy.
When out of the house I enjoy golfing and taking advantage of my private pilot certificate to enjoy the world from above.
I’m a firm believer in physical activity being crucial to good health and regularly run, bicycle and do modest weightlifting towards that end. You can read about this here if you’re interested.
I’m rather a fan of Heinlein’s view of what a human should be able to do and I believe this is reflected in my lifestyle.
What do I do?
In my day job I’m part of the Domino administration team for a large financial corporation. I have over 20 years experience now in computers from the Mainframe through to PCs.
I have intimate knowledege of many computer languages and environments – COBOL, CICS, DB2, MarkIV, Visual Basic, Oracle and Lotus Notes and absolutely love learning new skills and keeping abreast of technology, I think this blog is a testament to that fact. Here are some useful blog entries associated with my work skills.
I embarked on a quest to gain my private pilot’s certificate and was rewarded with achieving that goal a few years ago. Now I’m working to integrate flying into my leisure time in a practical way.