About Me

Current Resume Fun Projects Some really fun projects I've had the opportunity to work on. Call Accounting/Resale System This project is still making money for the customer in Abington, PA. It was my first project as a professional programmer. It’s been through many revisions and several versions of hardware and operating system changes. I learned so much about programming, database design and accounting/billing from this project. Oil Filter Test Stand I’ll get some photos posted soon of this project, but this by far is probably the most fun project I’ve ever got to work on. I got to write software that controlled all types of hardware. Including heat exchangers, laser particle counters, positive displacement pumps, oil pressure sensors. WOW! The customers that bought the test stands were Allied Signal and a German company that made airline hydraulics filters. This was just fun fun fun.	Who is Ben Rathbone? That's easy, it's me! I'm the youngest of 13 children and I'm proud to be a Rathbone. I'm a husband to my wife and a father to my 3 children. I feel like I'm the luckiest man alive because of my family. My kids each hold a special place in my heart. It excites me to see them succeed and their hugs make my day. There's simply nothing better than family. Professionally, I'm a IT guy. I've done it all. From helpdesk to programming, from managing projects to managing people, from dealing with problems to celebrating successes. I eat, drink and sleep computers. It doesn't take much to get me excited about technology. I've always been optimistic that technology will fix the world's problems. From my first BASIC program in middle school, to my virtual server that saves time and money, computers continue to solve problems. Technology is simply awesome. I'm passionate about programming and love working with hardware. The best thing at work is to see a coworker succeed and therefore the team succeeds and the company reeps the reward with us. I enjoy playing golf with friends, taking photographs and watching all the geeky TV shows like Star Trek and Heroes. I KNOW the best movie ever is Shawshank Redemption and IMDB users totally agreed with me. http://www.imdb.com/chart/top <---PROOF! Some more fun projects Remote Ticket Kiosks Working for SecureAgent, I got to develop remote ticket kiosks that sold tickets to the Opera, Ballet and Philharmonic. It made connections to servers at each of the box offices using SecureAgent’s encryption components. It presented the customer with several selections of tickets, then would complete a credit card transaction using ISDN dial-up and then print the tickets on site. The project never really took off, but it was a fun project anyway. BERT Aka Matrix Reports. This is still in use at Matrix Service Company and was fun to write and works like a champ. It’s simple for both report writers and end report users as well. It is an application that makes a connection to any number of databases, uses XML report definitions to query data, and then presents a report to the end user in Microsoft Excel. And it’s FAST! Newer web based reporting applications have replaced most of the reports now, but they will never match the ease at which reports can be written and the ability to kick off post-query macros in Excel. It was a lot of fun to write Ben’s Excel Report Tool. BERT! VMWARE The more I use VMWare, the more I see BIG TIME SAVINGS for companies everywhere. This stuff is simply awesome. We have saved over $100,000 in hardware alone migrating physical servers to virtual servers. Not to mention the added savings in maintenance contracts and other infrastructure required to have the servers physically connected to our network. If you have physical servers, you owe it to yourself to check out VMWare.