Hi.  I'm Ray.  I live in Chapel Hill, NC with my wife (Pam), son (Nick) and our two Maine Coon cats (Flash and Nimitz).  My mother's family has lived in North Carolina's Chatham and Orange counties since the 18th century.  I attended high school at Northwood High School in Pittsboro, NC (class of 1973).  I earned my bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  As an undergraduate I studied history, psychology and education.  My master's degree is an MAT in the Social Sciences and almost all of my graduate work focused on European military history.  Teaching jobs in history were scarce when I finished graduate school in the early 1980s but, fortunately for me, I had developed an interest in computers in the 1970s and had taken a number of computer and programming courses.  This experience was sufficient for me to get a job at my alma mater as a system administrator for a departmental PDP-11 minicomputer.  While at that job, I managed system users, system backups and got to write simple utilities using the version of Pascal installed on the PDP-11.  After about a year in that job, I was offered a position as a mainframe COBOL developer at the Liggett Group in Durham, NC.  I spent about a year and a half at the Liggett Group honing my skills then returned to UNC at Chapel Hill when I was offered a COBOL developer position in Administrative Information Systems, the department that handled the university's administrative software systems.  I would remain with the university for the next 30 years.  I retired from the university after over 30 years of service, ending my career as the Senior Systems Architect for Alumni and Development Applications, working in the University Development Office.  During the last period of my career I worked extensively with XML, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases and Windows development using Visual Studio and .Net while supporting in-house client/server applications and the division's implementation of Blackbaud's CRM (Constituent Relationship Management) system to replace our aging mainframe systems.  Since retiring, I've continued to consult a few hours per week for Wake Forest University which also implemented Blackbaud CRM around the same time as UNC.

​

Stay tuned.  I started this web site when UNC retired the environment that hosted my old (poorly maintained) web site.  I'll be adding more and refining this web site as time allows so visit again.