M1 Software, best company ever #

This was a fantastic company to work for. For meeting goals we got to have lunch on a boat in the Marina. For Christmas one year they took over a restaurant in Santa Barbara and put us up in a hotel and bought us train tickets to get there and a limousine waiting at the train station to take us to the hotel. There were so many perks and bonuses that went along with this job. They even paid the legal team that was working on getting me a green card (permanent residency).

I also learned why that second letter of employment was so hard for David to write. He was quite the stickler when it came to English grammar and plagiarism. It was not uncommon to come into my workspace in the morning and find emails that I had sent, printed out with red correction marks on them. I learned a lot about proper grammar rules from my time there.

I think it was within the first six months that I was at M1 that I got a call from Moyno Oilfield Products that they needed me to build a special front end for a pump testing stations that they were shipping to Venezuela. Herman, the electrical engineer on the project insisted that they get me to do this project as he reworked his magic to be based on the requirements that I put the software through to make this work. I told them that they would now have to negotiate with M1 as I was a full time salaried employee. That is what happened and for $1200.00 per day that M1 received for my time with them I came back to Edmonton to finish off the project. It was super easy because Herman understood what I was doing to capture the data so he modified the hardware and did not produce a number until the pressure stabilized so all I had to do was wait for the value to show up in my que and capture it. While I was there they had a steak BBQ in my honor and were just so super nice to me. While I was there I also packed up my apartment as I could not afford to keep two residences. My friend Kathy was supposed to live in it and I would pay half but I believe that she instead got married again. Some of the gang from Moyno plus my friend from college Ed Wells help me pack up. I ended up storing my stuff at Ed’s place in his unfinished basement until I could arrange to move it to California.

I did get some moving expense money from M1 and ordered a Pod to be delivered to Ed’s driveway where he loaded it up with my stuff. After he finished loading it up the Pod company picked it up and off it went to California. When it got to Los Angeles, I knew that the Pod company would not be able to deliver it down my street as it was very narrow and super hard to try and park. Instead I rented a UHaul, drove down to the Pod location and unloaded the Pod and put it into the UHaul truck. I got the furniture rental company to move their furniture out and Bob and I then moved my stuff into my apartment. It was really hard work took us all day and I got into a bit of trouble over the whole situation.

I worked on some great projects at M1.

• Reading data off a controller that is used to control the temperature and atmosphere on a shipping container
• Automate the process of recording property titles as no standards and can deferrer by state and sometimes by county.
• Hotel reservation forecasting software, bringing several systems into one hub and reconcile the results.