[UPHPU] Introduction

[Wayne Jensen]

On 9/26/06, Aaron Toponce <aaron.toponce at gmail.com> wrote:
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> I just joined the group and thought I would send an email introducing
> myself.
>
> As you can see from my signature, my name is Aaron Toponce.  I am the
> Ogden Area Linux Users Group President, and a member of the
> Ubuntu-Utah team.  I am a heavy Ubuntu advocate, and try to spread the
> good word wherever I can.  I've been using Linux since late '99, and
> Ubuntu since Warty Warthog 4.10 was released (Oct 2004).  I am a FOSS
> purist, and refuse to use proprietary software/protocols in my
> personal life.
>
> I am a heavy advocate of security and encryption protocols and
> applications, specifically using GPG.  I digitally sign all my emails,
> even to friends and family (if it isn't signed, it didn't come from
> me).  I use Tor, SSL, TLS and other tools wherever I can. :)
>
> I am not new to PHP, but I am not skilled in the language.  I've done
> some modest projects here and there, mainly just tinkering.  I am
> hoping to better my PHP skills by hanging out on the mailing list, and
> going to the meets.  But I am fairly confident in my skills as a
> C/C++, (X)HTML, CSS, SQL and Bash.  I know Perl fairly well, and I am
> just getting into Python.  So, I guess I'm a noob when it comes to
> programming! :)
>
> What else?  I'm married with no kids and two dogs.  I work for a
> company called Venture Data where we do political research surveys.  I
> am on the programming/sample team where I spend a great deal of time
> programming the surveys, and setting up a sampling of demographic
> numbers to dial.  We use a proprietary language called CfMC for most
> of our work.  In fact, as I am typing this, I am working on a PHP web
> page designed to replace the current process on how we setup dial-able
> sample.  We also use QuickBasic, Bash, csh, sh and Perl.
>
> Anyway, there's a little about me.
>
> - --
> Aaron Toponce - http://www.pthree.org
> OALUG President - http://www.oalug.com
> Ubuntu-Utah Member - http://www.ubuntu-utah.org
> Ubuntu Archiver - http://doc.gwos.org
> Ubuntu Advocate - http://www.ubuntu.com
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Hi Aaron.  I too am fairly new to the group (just lurking on the
mailing list because I live too far away to attend the meetings), and
I too work in market research using CfMC (as well as other CATI
packages).  I've been using PHP for 5 or 6 years now, mostly for
CATI-related tasks (reporting, sample formatting, etc), quite a bit
for information infrastructure, and a little bit for internet.  Sadly
I've done very little CATI programming since opening a phone center
with some partners and being consumed by managing it, but I'm in the
process of writing a series of very small PHP scripts to replace
myself ;) so I can get out of this small town and get back to
programming full time (although preferably far, far away from the
market research industry).

I'm also working on adapting Gnudialer to work with CfMC, but I don't
have much free time to work on that project and haven't made it very
far.