1986 to Present

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General Skills: Database and web site development, graphic design and production, LAN & WAN networking, firewalls and router configuration, computer maintenance, data backup management, team planning and communication, user technical support and documentation.

Expertise In: Claris FileMaker, Lasso, HTML, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, macOS.

Understanding and Use of: MySQL, ODBC, CSS, JavaScript, XML, HTML, AppleScript, Linux, UNIX, Window OS.

Work History: I started building databases at the age of 15, and at the time I didn't realize what a fantastic opportunity I was being given. I grew up in a small town in eastern Oregon where school students were encouraged to participate in the community to earn extra credit. I first learned about computers and electronics working on the city's water works projects programming fresh water and sewage pumps in Tiny Basic and Assembly language. From there I moved on to working on the city's asset management and depreciation database system in dBase II. It wasn't until our school got an Apple IIe that I really found out how cool computers could be, and you could even play games on them.

1988-1989, Broadway Productions: A year before graduating high school in Portland, Oregon, I started working nights in a downtown graphic design firm. Working there for three years I got exposed to the intricacies of typography, page layout, PostScript imagesetting, process printing, and all the great graphic production software from Adobe and Aldus (now one in the same).

1989-1992, Q.E.D. Ink: When my apprenticeship was over, I started my own graphic design company with my high school buddy, Prometheus Hawthorne-Jones. We spent two years working with a broad range of clients, creating everything from telephone pole band posters for Love & Rockets, to complex corporate identities, and helped in the creation of Plazm magazine.

1992-1997, Nike: From Q.E.D. I was permanently contracted by Nike in Beverton, Oregon. For five years I worked in every department they would let me, from Footwear and Apparel Design to the beginnings of their Multimedia Production department. I found a home in the Illustration Department where we produced Nike's four yearly apparel catalogs, and a slew of other printed and electronic sales materials. The bulk of Nike's apparel product line is manufactured only after it's been purchased by a retailer, so most sales material was photo-realistically created images in Adobe Illustrator then treated in Photoshop. After two years of grinding out sales catalogues I got bored, independently learned AppleScript, and within a year automated a huge portion of the department's workload. Nike asked me to stay but a late dear friend of mine in California, Peter Lalor, was going on about this thing called the Internet and asked me to move down and lend a hand with his startup ISP.

1997-2002, Infoasis: Infoasis was an IT consulting and Internet Service Provider to the greater San Francisco Bay Area, based in San Rafael. We provided personal and corporate IT support along with 56k dial-up, ISDN, DSL, and T1 Internet services, along with the obligatory web hosting, email, DNS, and Firewalls. That's where I learned that the first question to any tech support call, "Is there a wire running from the big box to an electrical outlet? Yes, I know, but if you plug a lamp into the outlet does the light-bulb turn on?" After that my boss asked me to build a billing system that could track an unknown group of settings, for an unknown group of services, and charge for them on a monthly basis - it was the beginning of the Internet, we had no idea what we'd have to provide next. That's where FileMaker came in, with great insight my boss bought me a copy and a few weeks training with Janet Tokerud. Janet is a highly successful FileMaker developer and was a phenomenal teacher for me, in a short time she had me bending the outer-limits of FileMaker. With that we added FileMaker consulting and database hosting to the list of Infoasis' services, and yes, the billing system took it in stride. Infoasis weathered the dot.com bust, but with the cunning ineptitude of PacBell to install DSL lines for our customers along with their outstanding 100,000 orders for their own DSL customers, we we're stuck with some really expensive telecommunications equipment in some really expensive closets. In 2002 Peter and I flew up to Seattle, Washington and inked a deal to turn over the ISP and hosting business to a really great group of people at digital.forest - I've been using their services ever since. With a smile on his face Peter promptly got on a plane to Australia with his family and said something about calm blue oceans and really good beer, for some reason I elected to stay in San Rafael.

2002-2006, i2d: With a handful of FileMaker consulting clients and leftover equipment digital.forest couldn't be bothered to ship back to Washington, another Infoasis employee, Jason Bray, and I teamed up with a seasoned FileMaker developer Ferdinand Hinds and his company i2d. Ferdinand radically expanded my horizons on the custom database and web development people needed, not only in small offices, but in large corporate environments like Apple, Cable & Wireless, Maxtor, and Hewlett-Packard, and the considerable role that FileMaker was playing within these companies. Jason taught me how to build solid web sites regardless of the technology they used. Rumor has it Jason even convinced me that MySQL is better for some sites than FileMaker. The three of us toughed it out 4 plus years. In the end we produced a string of great web sites and database solutions for our clients, and always managed to keep a sense of levity about our work. You name it, we built our own home-grown version of it, web-based help desk management, lobby security and employee tracking, document management, facilities maintenance, the list goes on. Our crowning jewel is the abusSTAR school administration software package built for use across the Caribbean, which has a great deal of promise.

2007-Present: With the desire to have a more flexible schedule, work independently, and do some mountain biking, I became a freelance consultant in early 2007 (a few months later we incorporated as Maxwell Klein Consulting, Inc.) Who knows what exciting challenges this change will bring. I hope to continue to follow my passion of working with people and companies on their database systems, database-driven web sites, and related technologies.