The professional background of Ronnie Alexander

I've been a Senior Member of the Nuclear and Plasma Physics
Society of IEEE. I represented Army Defense Electronics Lab
Harry Diamond (now simply Army Research Labs: ARL) in helping
to Charter the International Test and Evaluation Association.
I was appointed a member of the Public Health Service's
Engineer Profession Advisory Committee in 1995 (my three year
term was up by 1998.) Personally I hold a Ship Radar Radio
Operator's Endorsement, a Private Pilot License, and EIT
registration in WA - and I was  certified on sloops by the
Navy Sailing association. I first demonstrated qualification
for Mensa in 1978.

I want very much to return to design - integration of software
into active hardware, to top off my career. I'm looking for
something of a challenge, and a team that I can work with to
get it done. I'm really interested in a highly structured
software design environment, such as C++ Toolkits.

Present Work:

I've been with FDA since April, 1991. I came here to put to
work some of the technical expertise that America gave. In
1995 and 1996 I poineered enforcement of the Mammography
Quality Standards Act (MQSA) and worked to train other FDA
Consumer Safety Officers west of the Rockies to become
certified to inspect facilities under MQSA. When we finished
we had four Certified FDA MQSA Inspectors in the Pacific
Region to inspect over forty Federal Facilities, and audit
reports for about 2000 facility inspections in nine States
and the Pacific basin! With the herculean efforts of our
contract States we assure that American women get
consistently good quality mammograms. In the process I've
travelled all over the Pacific basin.

I've turned over the exotic travel to the younger Officers
with some regret! I'll miss such things as taking the island
hopper through Micronesia to Kwajalein Atoll, and getting up
in the middle of the night to see a flight of re-entry bodies
landing in the lagoon.

Now I'm the senior Radiological Health Officer in Los Angeles
District. It's mostly a lot of report review, and providing
technical expertise from the office. There's almost no actual
field work, a little supervision of work in the field, and I
have fewer personal deliverables than I'd like.

I spend my days auditing the performance of FDA inspection
contract State personnel, and want to change that and get
back to real engineering! Once or twice a year I'm called
on to evaluate the performance of State and local emergency
response agencies at Nuclear Power Plant Emergency exercises.

By the time I went to General Electric I was the one to call
when taking embedded designs to completion. Somehow there's
always something that stops progress just when they think
it'll fly, so their I was and tied up the loose ends. It is
invariably a loose end that is missed because those on the
development team don't know that one of the others'
experience provides the solution. It takes someone like me
to forge that final link, but always that solution was
already at hand - so I get the job done fast, and make sure
the credit goes to the one who knew it all along.

History:

I spent a lifetime developing comprehensive skills developing
embedded control software in the most technically challenging
environments in the history of the world. Since I always
worked with senior folks developing guidance and telemetry
solutions, many of them have left the industry. After
delivering the Trojan Simulator Nuclear Fuel Logistics model
to Bonneville Power Administration in 1979, I was an Optical
Communications Fellow at Oregon Graduate Center for Research
and Study into 1980. After having developed skills in PL1
and BASIC while in the Navy, it was a test of flexibility
to return to FORTRAN and begin pioneering applications in
C and ADA. But I left the federal government in 1984 as
Microprocessor Tactical Gamma Hardness Investigator at
Harry Diamond Labs (HDL) - America's lead lab for tactical
radiation effects evaluation.

At HDL I had developed special drivers and controllers in
Assembly, BASIC, C, and FORTRAN. I was the principal
investigator for determining tactical radiation
susceptibility of alternative microprocessor and
microcontrollers for electronic systems. I was a recognized
software expert, who was called on throughout the community
of Defense Electronics Labs. I was the one to make
everybody's incompatible designs work together for test and
evaluation. Having been a radiation effects specialist since
my days in Rickover's Navy, I knew what we were measuring -
a big advantage.

As a computer applications specialist between 1984 and 1991,
I spent a couple of years as Intel's integrated systems
manufacturing Quality Engineer, and then went on to develop
missile navigation and guidance software for GE, Northrop,
and weapons stores and maintaninence interface with a desk
at Librascope for Boeing/Sykorsky. I specified the
architecture for GE's small missile bid to deliver
navigation firmware using the Mil-Std-1750 processor and
MS-1553 real time communications channels. For Northrop's
Standard Attitude and Heading Reference System, I
incorporated the use of the newest satellite positioning.

When I was at Intel, we developed a training program for
teaching our engineers the C language. I approved all
factory information system software for Intel's integrated
systems manufacturing, which meant that I had to be a
better programmer in C, Fortran, and Pascal, than anyone
else in manufacturing at Intel's development systems
operations. I also had to be knowledgeable in the processor
architectures for which we manufactured in-circuit emulators.
I had three computers at home all the time, and lived and
breathed it all - just as I had lived and breathed developing
new test methodologies at Torpedo Station Keyport, and at
Harry Diamond Labs.

Folks I've worked with:

July 14, 1997:-> I try to stay in touch with folks I've
known along the way - some of these are home numbers, and
others have been lost temporarily to me:

Gary Findley or Terry Gibson 503-681-8080... this is still
Intel Oregon, but no one seems to know either of these folks.
They were both plant QA managers, one after the other - I
first worked with Gibson and then Findley to implement my
solutions. (I knew Gibson from school, but didn't realize
that who I was to work for until I got there - nice surprise)

Harvey Eisen 301-394-3070... I worked with Harvey and with
Niel Wilkin at Harry Diamond tactical radiation effects
evaluation lab; Tim Oldham got to Light Branch Chief - it
was Raine Gilbert when I was there, Tim was the single
event upset researcher. It's been about two years since I
last spoke to Harvey, and the TREE lab appears to have moved
elsewhere, though... (Assembly test code and microcode
drivers/ CPM and CDOS, and beta testing of C and ADA compilers)

Dave Ojima 360-396-5111... I worked for Dave at Naval
Undersea Warfare Engineering Station, Keyport - we developed
new automatic test engineering systems/distributed automatic
test stations. (control basic test development/ FORTRAN or
microcode drivers, test equipment on HP9500)

John Ryder 508-945-2106... home phone; I worked for John at
GE. I also worked with Bob Stowe at GE; we were nieghbors
with his daughter Valerie and have kept in touch with her.
I was the software implementation guy for Dr. Glen Gracious
and Dr. Brookes Bridges for demonstrating the accuracy of
strapdown guidance at rocket sled testing at Holloman AFB
for Trident II/D4; I also ported the Draper D4 list
processing guidance system into a Mil-Std-1750B frame
sequencing navigation preprocessor for the small missile bid.
(Assembly embedded code/ test sequencing, and telemetry in
FORTRAN and Assembler on flight GC and HPUX)

Ken Laurence or Paul Abrahamson 617-762-5300... this number
answers Allied Signal now, who bought the Division and closed
it down. I delivered what we believed was the first functional
embedded simulator at speed for a Kalman filtered 100kHz
accelerometer inertial reference systems when I worked for
them - but such things were being tried widely back then, and
Sandia claimed credit two years after we delivered... it was
a real shortcut to actually fly on the bench a proposed
attitude and heading reference software in the shop.
(Assembly embedded code/ test sequencing in BASIC with C and
Assembly drivers on HPUX)