About GeodSoft
George D. Shaffer resides in Alexandria, VA.
GeodSoft (George Shaffer) may be contacted if
you fix:
G-e-o-r-g-e at-sign
G=e=o=d=S=o=f=t period c~o~m
Please do not request free assistance, access to source code which is not already public, or
ask about advertising on GeodSoft.com.
GnuPG Key and Fingerprint
To send me private (encrypted) email, or verify the authenticity
of digitally signed messages you receive from me, you can use
my key ID: A1 A2 31 94 (remove the spaces)
to add my public key to your keyring.
Fingerprint (less 8) = C13C 8C18 F970 BD83 7864 9292 79E4 8D63
The missing 8 hex digits of the finger print are the same as the
8 hex characters of the key ID.
I had to remove my public key from this site, since I started to get
spam messages to my alias email addresses, which could only have
come from this public key. Spammers should be sentenced to 1 day in
a maximum security prison for every spam message they send.
Capsule Resume
George Shaffer, began programming professionally in early 1983. Since
then, in addition to programming, he has a wide variety of
system design, analysis, and computer management
experience. He has been developing and managing web sites on NT,
Linux, BSD and Sun systems since February 1996. Projects have
included web design, development and back end database/web
integration for large associations. With an
extensive graphic arts background before computers, he brings a
unique combination of skills to web site development. Prior to
computers, he worked as a freelance illustrator. In addition to a
B.A., he has a two year Commercial Arts degree and an award
winning academic art history with four years of college level
arts courses.
Professional History
In the last year of college, before
obtaining a B.A. from Dickinson College, George Shaffer
became interested in art and began taking as many studio art courses
as he could. He continued art studies at George Washington University
and the Corcoran School of Art, while attempting to make a career
of fine art. He had work handled by the prominent Washington Pyramid
and Fendrick galleries in the early 1970's. While at the Corcoran,
his work was noticed by then Corcoran Director, Gene Baro, who selected
a series of air brush drawings for display in one of the Corcoran
hallways and hung one of George's large paintings directly behind
his office desk for about 6 months.
After a few year hiatus from art,
George Shaffer completed a two year Commercial Art degree
graduating Summa Cum Laude from Northern Virginia Community
College. He won the grand prize in the illustration category
of the metropolitan competition, open to all Washington area college
and university art students, sponsored by the Washington Art Directors
Club. His work was selected for inclusion in the national competition,
sponsored by the New York Society of Illustrators. As a freelance
illustrator, his clients included the Washington Post and the Washington
Star, the prominent Washington advertising agencies, Earl Palmer
Brown, Kal Merrick and Salan and Goldberg Macasano as well as a
variety of government agencies and associations.
Following the economic slowdown
of 1981 and the Reagan imposed moratorium on government publications,
George Shaffer turned to computers and completed Computer Learning
Center's six month programming program, graduating with honors
in late 1982. From early 1983 to 1988 he worked for three
computer consulting firms on a variety of programming, design
and analysis projects of increasing size and complexity. Languages
included COBOL, Z80, 80x86 and Wang assemblers
and several Basics; he also worked with the Speed II application
generator and the Total DBMS. OSs were Wang,
CPM and DOS including their scripting languages.
For his last consulting project he was the lead developer for all
telecommunications subsystems for the 4 million dollar CIMS project
at the Department of Commerce; his projects were the only system
components completed on or ahead of schedule.
In 1988, George Shaffer
joined the Association of Trial Lawyers of America as a Senior
Programmer Analyst. In one three month period he designed and
wrote a 14,000 line dBase Convention registration system.
The three months included user training and multiple test setups
and dry runs for the on-site registration process, in which four
PCs controlled six printer trays through printer sharing boxes, to
automatically print six different badge colors based on complex
member and registration type criteria. Additional colors could be
printed with operator prompts. He personally built and installed
ATLA's first Novell server.
In late 1991 George Shaffer
was promoted to Manager of Information Services at ATLA.
One of his first projects as Manager was to work with consultants,
select a vendor and assist in negotiating a contract
to re-cable the building, in preparation for the move to a full scale
Novell LAN. In 1992 he was the sole author, following many interviews
and with numerous reviews and sign offs, of a 240 page, Request
for Proposal for an integrated association management system;
multiple vendors indicated that the RFP was the most comprehensive
they had ever received. He was a key participant in the final vendor
selection and participated in nearly every contract negotiation
session over an eight month period, that in September 1993 resulted
in a $920,000 computer system acquisition contract, from the vendor then named
Data Management Group. He played a key role in managing the installation
of the new system through late 1995, by which time the core modules
had been installed.
Despite the Manager title, and
at times supervising up to eight staff and managing a nearly one
million dollar department budget, George Shaffer never stopped performing
the technical functions which are his greatest strength. He has
done projects in Perl, Basic(s), AIX/ksh shell
scripts, COBOL, C, SQL and ColdFusion.
In addition to working with AIX, NT 3.51 and 4 (both workstation
and server with both versions), Novell, DOS,
Windows 3.1, and Wang, George has experience
with both OS/2 and Macintosh at both work and home.
With the arrival of an RS/6000 for the DMG system, he became familiar
with AIX administration and eventually automated every routine
management task, so that despite its central role in ATLA operations,
the RS/6000 took less staff management time than any other ATLA
server. Those few tasks that cannot be automated, disk management,
unusual load conditions, and system errors, result in automated e-mails
to system administrators advising them of the unusual conditions.
In February 1996, George
Shaffer was given responsibility for
ATLA's web site. Though he had many other small
projects and tasks, the web site was by far his
largest single project for nearly four years. After 11 years of
new environments, tools and challenges at ATLA, George decided it was
time to move on. With near perfect timing, in late February 2000,
George Shaffer
left ATLA on excellent terms and formed GeodSoft, LLC,
just as the dot com economy started to dive. ATLA was
GeodSoft's first and remained its largest customer.
GeodSoft,
LLC is now closed.
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