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I became addicted to the Internet in 1990, which resulted in my flunking out in royal fashion from Dal, but not before I learned enough to get an entry level job for NSTN.ca, the regional CA*Net node, and one of the earliest dial-up ISPs in the HRM and subsequently, the province of Nova Scotia, and parts of New Brunswick. I left NSTN in April 1995 to pursue a more technical career path with ANS.net, the NSFnet backbone (which would soon be sold to America Online for the meager sum of $35 million bucks, and thus ending the government regulation against commercial traffic on the public Internets. My move preceded the Canadian merger of several ISPs into the short-lived I*Star company, which went bankrupt; Canada has not had successful national ISP to date. AOL was not as pleasant to work for as ANS.net was, and by Feb. 1997, I had interviewed and accepted a NOC position with a startup cable modem network service provider @Home, pre-IPO. Before half a year had passed, I'd been asked to head up a network operations/engineering team of my own design, which would be responsible for handling NOC escalations. This team became a tight-knit group of 14, and its cohesiveness lasted til I resigned in June '01, due to interference with my staff by AT&T senior management. Sept 01 started with a job offer from the City of San Bruno, a suburb of San Francisco who had their own municipal CATV system, and had recently signed up with the floundering @Home for service. Asked to create a contingency plan in case my former company went bankrupt, I procured 5 pentium IV workstations with 2G/ram and 1.9 Ghz CPUs, on which I ran Redhat Linux and FreeBSD; I procured a DS3 from Sprintlink, a modem provisioning service from Core networks, a Halifax-based company, at a very steep discount (1/10th list price), and on March 1st, 2002, made a seamless cutover from @Home services to sanbrunocable.com services, including NAT of manually configured IP addresses, and sendmail re-writing of home.com/home.net emails to sanbrunocable.com addresses. All POP3 accounts and passwords were preserved, and even weeks after the transition had taken place, with all bugs worked out, we would still get the occasional "When's the cutover going to happen?" inquiries from customers who had simply not noticed they were now 'under new management'. Unfortunately, Dave Thomas, the original builder of the 1971 (the year I was born) plant, was to retire at the end of 2003, as was his boss, the City Manager, Frank Hedley. With these two went first-hand experience of my commitment and dedication to the network I'd built, and grew from 1200 to 3600 subscribers, netting the City a cool $1 mil/year profit. I was able to last 11 months under Dave's replacement, before calling it quits; A great job had turned sour, and that would spell the end of my 10 year tenure in the US of A.
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