Jonathan Allan's Home Page

Passion:

Voluntary Simplicity.  I enjoy squeezing a buck until the eagle grins.  But VS has many other aspects besides frugality, so I'm exploring those too.   I like the ideas so much, I went out and found a co-author and a publisher.  Live Simply in the City was the result.

I've also gotten the local paper to publish a few Letters to the Editor on VS topics. Car Costs is an expanded version of one item.

I teach Community Education classes around VS topics and have a few canned presentations of various lengths built around my book and Your Money or Your Life by Dominguez and Robin.  Drop me a note if you want to explore having me deliver one of them.   I used to hand out a diskette with supplemental information on it, but nobody has a floppy drive any more, so here is a zip file (620K) with all that supplemental information.

This work turned up in Quality Progress , August 2004 issue.

When I'm not working of VS stuff, I'm lazing around the house (ha!) or doing something at the Rochester Civic Theatre.

Here are some graphs related to my money work that you may find interesting.

A group of Your Money or Your Life enthusiasts got together recently for a working session in Trout Lake, Washington at the Trout Lake Country Inn. Carolyn Estes facilitated our group sessions and told fascinating tales about her life on the farm: a most excellent facilitator to shepherd our group through many, many decisions. Dave Wampler coordinated the get together and everyone else is connected in some way to New Road Map Foundation or The Simple Living Network forums. Here's a picture of the group (240K) . The group members are:

  • Front Row, L-R: Jill Lucht, Jane Zeender, Monique Tilford, Fred Ecks, Kevin Cornwell
  • Middle Row, L-R: Dave Wampler, me, Tom Calloway, Ann Haebig, Alan Seid, Carolyn Estes
  • Back Row: Linda and Mike Lenich, Pam, Jacque and Dave Heitmiller, Rozie Hughes
    •

    Employer:

    Mayo Clinic - Rochester.
    Currently I work in the Development Support Center.  The DSC provides development tools and supports them, trains developers in good process, and tries to be the continuous improvement office for the IT silos.  We also work directly with the business areas when they have an IT-like project; again bringing tools and process knowledge for the business units to use.

    Prior to the DSC, I worked in the Mayo Division of Engineering doing project management, program architecture, design, and coding.  The biggest project I worked on was the Anesthesia Call System replacement: 1500 LCD displays and 1000 keypads (each their own little microcomputer) spread across two hospitals and two central server clusters.  This project turned into the paper Computer-Based Anesthesiology Paging System in Anesthesia and Analgesia  Volume 97, #1, July 2003.  One of the smaller projects I managed also turned into this paper: Dual Electrospray Ionization Source for Confident Generation of Accurate Mass Tags Using Liquid Chromotography Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance Mass Spectrometry in Analytical Chemistry,  Volume 75, Number 14, July 15th, 2003.  My DOE colleagues and co-authors made all the difference.

    Prior to Mayo, I've worked for several other companies and as a consultant.  Send me a request for a resume if you want the gory details.  Suffice it to say that there are very few computers available after 1980 that I haven't worked on, however briefly, at some point in my career.

    Professional Activities:

    I'm a member of the IEEE Computer Society and hold the IEEE Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP) Certification.  I'm also a member of the American Society for Quality and hold the Certified Software Quality Engineer (CSQE) designation.  All that really means is I'm good at taking tests.  }8-)

    I earned an: MBA from the University of Minnesota in 2007;

  • M.S. Software Engineering from the University of St. Thomas in 1997;
  • and a B.S. Computer Science from the University of Missouri in 1987.
    • I expect to die in a college classroom...  ;-) It's congenital however:, between us three brothers, there are eight college degrees. and the rest of my extended family is seldom less educated.  And no, the fact all the graduation dates end in "7" was not planned. Though now that the pattern is established, I'll have to do something for 2017... ;-)

    Interests:

    Some of my interests can be found here:
    The Simple Livng Network
    IEEE Computer Society .
    American Society for Quality (ASQ) .
    Rochester Civic Theatre - I've been in three shows (Henry T. Dobson in Anything Goes, a Transylvanian in The Rocky Horror Show and the expendable Red Shirt in Return to the Forbidden Planet) and have done back stage stuff for years.
    Habitat for Humanity - I wish I had more time to volunteer here.
    Midwest Renewable Energy Association .
    Some of "my" other exploits ;-) .

    Some fun sites:

    FI-related Stuff
    Home Power
    NASA

    Some good books (in no particular order):

    Your Money or Your Life - Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin
    The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - Steven Covey
    G:odel, Escher, Bach - Douglas R. Hofstadter
    How to Talk Minnesotan - Howard Mohr
    Out of the Crisis - W. Edwards Deming
    The Psychology of Computer Programming - Gerald Weinberg
    Peopleware - DeMarco & Lister

    Old e-mail addresses:

    I've had a number of e-mail addresses over the years. Here's a brief list of legacy ones I'll admit to in case you're looking at an old archive somewhere:
    C8040V - Rolla
    C8040AQ - Rolla
    XZZ0529 - IBM
    kpa@millcomm.com - Rochester

    Current Address:

    Mail to Jonathan or Pam.