About
Welcome to the vanity site of Bill Barnett. There may not be much of interest to you here unless you’re interested in me, or at least curious. If you have no idea who I am, you might gain some insight about a day in the life of your typical middle aged, software developing, small family fathering, hockey playing, Disney loving, good food and drink enjoying, caucasian male.
I write about my professional life as a software developer at Agilo.us and about personal finance at Where’s Our Money. There is much more detailed information about my life below.
1961-1970
I was born and raised in Cincinnati, OH, the fourth of five kids, two brothers and two sisters. My father was a police officer, and eventually became the Chief of Police of Indian Hill, OH but we lived on Murray Avenue in Mariemont until I was five years old. My mother tells me that I was a happy child but aside from the usual childhood memories my recollections of “the early years” are vague to me now.
1970-1980
I spent most of my formative years in Anderson Township. There I grew, made friends, played baseball and soccer, and fell in love for the first time. I graduated from McNicholas High School in 1979, and after one year of “studies” at the University of Cincinnati, entered the United States Marine Corps in October 1980.
1980-1990
After graduating from boot camp, and undergoing training in NAS Memphis and MCAS Cherry Point, I was eventually stationed at MCAS Beaufort. I was an “air winger” not a “grunt” and the closest I ever came to combat was being put on alert for Grenada. I did get to travel a bit, the most memorial deployment being to Bodø, Norway. Upon my honorable discharge from the Marine Corps I was hired by Delta Air Lines and shortly thereafter joined the United States Air Force Reserve. I also took another stab at earning my bachelor’s degree at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Applied Science where after a chance meeting with a high school friend who had recently received a commission in the Marine Corps, I gave the idea some credence myself and spent a fun filled summer at Officer Candidate School in Camp Upshur, MCB Quantico, VA. I soon came to the realization that Marine officers were a cut above anything I might ever be and withdrew from the Officer Selection program. A short while later, I accepted full-time employment with Delta Air Lines with the lofty title of “Mechanic’s Helper” (essentially a non-licensed aircraft mechanic) and for the second time left the University of Cincinnati.
1990-2000
My father took me to see a Cincinnati Swords hockey game when I was a kid but Cincinnati is a baseball town and hockey, at least until recently, ranked around 50th on the list of local sports interests. Nonetheless, I remained interested in the game and had the opportunity to learn to play in 1990 and jumped at the opportunity. I am self taught but there are few things I enjoy to this day more than “lacing ‘em up” and mucking around on the ice for a while. For most of that decade I did little more than play hockey, drink beer, and work. Unbeknownst to me, fate had other plans for my future. After suffering a broken collar bone while playing hockey, I was relegated to a desk job for a brief period shortly after Delta’s acquisition of some of Pan-Am’s assets shortly before the latter succumbed to bankruptcy which introduced me to desktop computers and my future father-in-law. While desk-ridden I created a database of the capital equipment assigned to my department, wrote a key performance indicator tracking application, and designed my department’s first intranet site. I met and married the daughter of a coworker who had come over from Pan-Am and it didn’t occur to me until that point in my life that it was time to get serious about “things” only I still hadn’t quite decided what that meant. Whenever I didn’t know what to do in life I went back to college, and so I returned to UC for the third and final (so far) time in 1997 studying computer science and French.
2000-Today
I worked third shift (11PM – 7AM) while attending UC mostly part-time from 1997 until one month after 9/11 when I held my breath and took the buy-out offered by Delta in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. The money I received permitted me to complete what I expected to be two years of part-time studies in one full-time year. I graduated with honors with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and a certificate of competence in business French in June 2002 and was hired a month later by Cincinnati Children’s Hospital to deploy a Web-based attendance tracking program I had developed with two classmates as a senior project at UC. Three years later, shortly after the birth of my daughter, I left Children’s to help develop an electronic transcript exchange service for SCRIP-SAFE. In early 2008, I formed an LLC with a colleague from SCRIP-SAFE to create a Web-based budgeting tool called BudgetSketch. The economic down turn caught up to me early in 2009 when my position at SCRIP-SAFE was eliminated. I have been doing contract software development ever since while trying to get BudgetSketch off the ground. Among other entrepreneurial activities, I’m a member of a software development cooperative and a local coworking initiative.
