I am a Kansas State University alumnus. I graduated in four years with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. I work at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City and am currently working on my Masters of Software of Engineering, also from K-State. Although, this time around I am letting the job pay for my education and am doing it entirely online. The one downfall I've found to finishing my masters online is that I have been missing the fun times on campus with the awesome group of friends I met at St. Isidore's Student Center. The rest of my family lives in El Dorado, Kansas, where I return every so often for weekend visits, except for my sister, her husband and their son and my Grandparents who live in KC, my sister and husband who live in Illinois, and my sister and brother-in-law who are living in Manhattan finishing up school. I guess we are starting to get spread out, which means I don't get to see them as much as I'd like.
The country boy in me found its way back to a bit of the country although that turned out to be short-lived. Living in Kansas City was about to make me go nuts. So I bought a house plenty far away from the bustling lights and noisy city traffic. It made driving to work a bit longer (about 64 miles one-way depending on my route), but I was so liking the scenery and open space. OK, so I would gladly take that nifty transporter from Star Trek to speed getting to work, but the drive gave me time to reflect and say a rosary on the way into the office every morning. The smalltown house in Eudora seemed to be in the perfect location, but the drive eventually got to us both. We decided that if we moved back to the city, we could spend an entire hour more with each other. We moved back to the "concrete jungle" of Lenexa in 2005 and are actually thinking of filling that extra time with chillins'.
In the meantime, I got a little chillin' of my own. After years of drooling, I am now the proud owner of a '03 BMW R1150R. I named my new ride Benedict because I made the purchase on the same day the world was blessed with the new Pope, Pope Benedict XVI. The bike handles like it did in my dreams and is just so purty to look at. I just have to keep reminding myself that the transmission and engine are not the same as on my honda CB750 (in pieces in the garage) and that I can't push the throttle until it shakes. Smooth at 75 mph is my new reality. :)
It's amazing how everything I had in my little room at home spread out to fill an entire apartment, and then spread even further to fill an entire house. We added Janet's stuff to mine and we were soon out of space. Now we have two extra rooms that are just waiting for little feet to start filling them up...
The pool table now has its own place in the basement, right next to the bar. I do sorely miss the three car garage in Eudora! We'll have to keep you posted on whether or not Good Shepherd comes anywhere close to rivaling St. Isidore's...
I've moved from Hallmark.com back to the corporate life in the Information Technology division. After working in the most awesome building in KC, Union Station, the old train depot, the old cubicle life was a bit of an adjustment. I was a sort of "Jack of all trades" at dotcom. I spent most of my time on the release team, which means that whenever the site changed at all, my team was responsible for it. We did everything from moving code into production to testing performance to fixing bugs that pop up last minute. The last 4 months I spent on the development team trying to brush up on my development skills before I was sent back to the corporate building to help out with another project. It was a lot of fun working with the folks at hallmark.com and I will miss them greatly. I had to give up my nifty two way pager and cell-phone, but this change should be a step in the right direction for my career, so I'm extremely happy. I am now a Subject Matter Expert on the Distribution Excellence project. Basically, the largest material handling equipment project in the world. We teamed up with Siemens and installed miles of conveyors and mail sorters and lots of card picking racks and computerized the whole getup. We got to use all sorts of technologies from JAVA, WebLogic, DB2, Radio Frequency, Wi-Fi, Visual-Basic.Net, C++, Unix Shell, and Windows Shell. My resume and responsibilities have both grown much fatter from this experience.
Need a lift? My dream Hi-Rise Monte Carlo SS is still on hold for a while. I realized that insurance for a guy under 25 was unreachable by mortal man, so I'm still driving Black '96 Pontiac Grand Prix. It has a few miles on it now, I picked it up with only 14k in 2000! I picked up my new ride at the dealer that was working on my truck. I think it looks like Kit from Knight Rider, but without the LED light bar and voice (so far it, hasn't ever spoken to me, but you never know...) I now have a CD player and radio controls on the steering wheel. "Voted best feature ever." I think I'll enjoy the air conditioner in the summer too. As nice as the car is, I do miss driving the K-State Purple Pickup. It has a ruggedness to it that a sporty car can't touch. Besides, it was purple. The "routine" repair bill for the ol' S-10 was going to cost me almost as much as a down payment and with the seemingly constant repairing I was enduring, so I decided to jump into a car loan. The car is now old enough that insurance is affordable and I've made all the payments so it is
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Speaking of Fraternities... I am also an alumnus of the National Band Honorary, Kappa Kappa Psi. Yes, I am a greek, but this is another service fraternity, we help the bands at K-State with almost whatever they need. My senior year I was in charge of managing their web pages and e-mail listserv address lists. I watched KKY help the bands for three years and finally decided to join my friends and have fun while I help out too. Marching Band was a big part of my college career. I met my first new friends there and got some unbeatable opportunities like: free admission to every homegame (OK I had to sing.. er, rather, play for my supper), bowl trips! ('nuff said), and I got to work with the most awesome professor, Dr. Frank Tracz. He has so much on his shoulders with all the bands, yet he still took the effort to connect with and get to know all of his students.
I had an internship at Boeing after my junior year. I had my own cube (in the same building as Dilbert. I swear I saw him) and wrote scripts to make the life of the database analysts easier and more enjoyable. I automated some tasks for them and wrote some structures to retrieve old part codes so they could be transfered to CDROM. I also got to help setup some factory workstations that will deliver data to tell those big expensive machines how to cut out a part. The money was great for a college student, the people are awesome, and the work suits me, but I did get anxious toward the end of the summer to get back to school and see my friends at St. Isidore's Student Center.
During the school year I worked as a help desk support staff member at the Department of Continuing Education (across the street from Nichols Hall). I picked up tons of experience and learned new techniques for programming, fixing computers, managing employees, and relating to consumers. I think this job really helped me to land the big one at Hallmark.
My senior year I picked up an icq program and started talking more with friends after they go home. I've got my mom and brother set-up with it too, so now the family can talk for pretty much free. My ICQ# 56133704
I also have a Personal ICQ Communication Page
The story thus far: 31 years ago my mother and father were wed in St. Isidore's Catholic Church on Campus at this very college. They moved to El Dorado where my father acquired a Veterinary practice. As the years went by, along came Amanda (now married to David McAdams, living in K.C. and mother of one), Jamie(now married to Bud Turner and mother of three), Joseph (a senior at KSU), myself, Bernadette (now married to Jeremy Tiemann), Bridget (married to Will Handel who is serving in our nations army at The Big Red One in Ft. Riley, KS -- Bridget is also a sophomore at this awesome school), Cecilia (a freshman at Bluestem High School, my alma mater in Leon), and Andrea (a third grader at Haverhill Elementary and loving it).
Over the span of years, my siblings and I have helped out working at our parents' clinic, The El Dorado Animal Clinic, in downtown El Dorado. Mom took the role of Office Manager and consequently we can all claim it as our first paying job. I've gone from full time at the clinic for summer, to part time masonry hand, to Computer Analyst intern at Boeing, and now on to full time Web Software Designer at Hallmark.Hobbies? I enjoy learning. Call me crazy, but Science is my thing. Anything that has some physical change involved will catch my eye.
I keep two aquariums (a 29 gal. and 10 gal.), build model rockets and airplanes, collect things, lift weights, hunt, brew homemade wine, and fiddle with computers (that explains the Computer Science bit). I decided that since I can break them so easily, I had better know how to fix them. ...Funny thing, after three years of college I haven't broken many... except for that run in with Chernobyl, but I didn't do it and you can't prove anything (note: Joseph recovered his term paper from biological memory and got one of the the highest grades in his class)!
I have been hooked on computers ever since Mom bought our first computer in 1988. The Epson Apex runs on an 8088 processor at the mind numbing speed of about 4.7 MHz or, if it's feeling lucky, a warp speed of 10 MHz. It has a vast 20 MB of hard drive space and roughly 2 MB RAM (on a good day).
My brother bought a Pentium 233 MMX so I took some time off from homework and beat QuakeII.
Over the summer of 1997, I got to set up a Pentium PRO 200 MHz running SCO Unix Network Server/Workstation software at Dad's office. It has several dumb green screen terminals and two emulation terminal stations (one of which being our first home computer), and I am constantly
getting requests to add more stations, but that requires more capital than I have in my budget.
I acquired two IBM PS/2 model 70 PCs from our church garage sale and refurbished them. One went to work as a solitaire server for Dad at the office and the other to my sister Jamie, so her kids can join the digital age.
Thanks for visiting my page. I should have new info posted as soon as I write it (seems to be about yearly). If you have any comments, suggestions, or just feel like talking, send me a message at waashew@cis.ksu.edu or to keep postal workers happy, my address is:
Matthew Harkins 13227 W 77th Terrace Lenexa, KS 66216Check out the weather here in Lenexa.
