About

My name is Dave Lane and I’ve been getting paid for technical know-how for 20 years. I began using computers back on an Apple II (Bell&Howell Black version) in Iowa when I was 9 years old and have been hooked on technology ever since.

I ran a bulletin board with an Atari 800 modded for 64k of memory and dual disk drives with a Doubler chip, so it was top notch for it’s time – that’s when I was 13. I moved on to programming for a Porta Printer franchisee, coding water meter file conversions from PC XTs to IBM mainframes at the age of 15 – when I started getting paid to do this stuff. – Did I mention how much COBOL I have forgotten?

Then came some odd jobs, a stint with the 82nd Airborne and a trip to Iraq in the first desert conflict and eventually off to the American desert in Phoenix where I worked at Avnet building PCs – my first job ‘in the Industry’. My prior coding skills helped me move quickly to building the most complex systems that Avnet sent to customers and I began working with corporate procurement and IT groups to spec and customize workstation and mid-range server systems along with Digital Storageworks and HP RAID arrays – all the way to customizing systems that Intel used to build a 386 generation of processors.

I then landed at Xerox Connect working as a consultant migrating corporate customers from systems like Banyan Vines to NT and worked with a Microsoft PPM – Partner Program Manager – to build a Microsoft consulting arm in the Xerox Connect branch I was in.

This led me to the last step in my career – joining the Beast of Redmond. I started with Microsoft in 1998 as a Technical Account Manager and spent the next 7 1/2 years moving to MCS Consultant, Services Sales Executive and finally to Solution Specialist for Information Worker technologies.

I’m married to a wonderful, beautiful and fun wife, Melissa. We had our first child, Rowan, in July, 2005. I can’t wait to show him the world and see it through his eyes.

I have been knee deep in technology for the vast majority of my life and this blog will let me put some of those experiences down in writing. Enjoy or pan, either way, I hope you read it.