Paul Ballard's Weblog

While I seldom manage to keep a balance between them, my life is divided into roughly three sections.

Work/Professional/Technical

I’ve been writing software for more than twenty years and count myself among only a few of my peers who remembers doing development before Windows, mice, and >640K of memory to say nothing of the Internet.  My career has spanned literally dozens of different systems in and out of the Fortune 100 using numerous technologies.  Throughout I have always strived to be a leader technically and to be as good of a mentor as the individuals who gave of themselves to mentor me along the way.  Most recently my technical expertise has centered around Microsoft development using all aspects of the .Net technology including WCF, WinWF, SharePoint 2007, Office VSTO, and others.  I’ve been published in several magazines including MSDN as well as being a technical reviewer on a couple of programming books.  I’ve also been a speaker at a number of conferences including VSLive and Microsoft Tech-Ed USA.

Currently I’m an enterprise architect for a maker of video slot machines and casino management software based in sunny Las Vegas.  I work at the strategic level helping to set the technical direction of the systems division while also working at the detail level directly with developers across multiple technologies as an architect and mentor.

Family/Friends/Social

On the home front, I’m happily married to my wife Susan.  I have one son, generally referred to as “The Boy”, who is currently in college pursuing his own nerdly course.  Susan and I also have an aging black lab named Maggie that is either amusing us to belly-laughs or sleeping noisily.

I’m the middle child of seven with brothers and sister scattered all over the US.  I don’t get to see them nearly as often as I’d like.  I grew up mostly in rural Kentucky, but have lived all over the USA including both coasts and the flat middle states in between.  I have recently returned back to the USA after spending more than two years living in London, England and then more than a year in Bangalore India. I’m now based in the Las Vegas area where the weather is good and the lifestyle is better.

I have friends in nearly every continent now and my travel schedule has come down significantly.  I like travelling but don’t care for flying much, even though the past year has seen me do nearly 100,000 air miles (according to British Airways Executive Club account).

Creative/Music/Writing

Man doesn’t live by code alone and so I try to squeeze in other interests.  I enjoy creative writing and have several stories brewing in my mind waiting for me to get the time and inspiration to pour them out onto the computer.  I’m also a former band nerd who decided at 32 to try again and was luckily enough to find himself in the Columbia College Jazz Ensemble under the direction of Bill Russo.  This was one of the greatest experiences of my life and while I was certainly not as good as most of my fellow members, playing with them and for a master composer like Bill Russo was something I’ll always be thankful I got the opportunity to do.

Other creative pursuits come up occasionally as I have a few artsy type projects brewing as well, but as usual its a matter of finding a way to squeeze it all into days that are already overcrowded.