Home page of Bob Ribokas

Welcome to the Home Page of Bob Ribokas

Visit BobsPixels Digital Photography web site at http://www.BobsPixels.com.

I am a portfolio/systems analyst currently employed by HCL Technologies where I started working in July, 2006. Prior to that I worked as a software developer, system analyst and portfolio analyst at Teradyne, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts. I started working at Teradyne in 1983 and worked there for almost 23 years, until my job was finally outsourced... to HCL.

I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and I now live in Weymouth, Massachusetts with my wife and better half, Robin, our four three cats, and some odd number of tropical fish. Check out my friends and family photo album to see some of the people, past & present, who are responsible for making me what I am. I also have a little page on the IBM 1130 computer if you're interested in seeing how I got started in all of this computer geek-type stuff.

The current major focus of my job (still) involves the support of an archaic legacy system called MERLIN which is written primarly in COBOL (gag!) and utilitizes Oracle as its primary database architecture. The system is wonderful and appropriately named as it manages to perform major feats of magic considering the tools that were used to develop it and the fact that it is now over ten TWENTY years old.

Other, more interesting projects, that I have worked on have been in done Oracle Developer Forms, Visual Basic and FoxPro. These projects have given me needed relief from constant care and feeding of the MERLIN dinosaur. During my free CPU cycles I do a lot of net-surfing, web-crawling and coding of HTML for my Grand Canyon Explorer web site. I am also trying to learn UNIX in my spare time as this is becoming one of those necessary evils these days. Unfortunately I grew up with Digital's VMS operating system (excuse me, it is called Open VMS these days) and I have become used to an operating system that actually does something for you. Learning how to grep is not something that comes natural. Most recently I have been redesigning my Grand Canyon Explorer web site to use PHP with a backend MySQL database. I truly love coding in the PHP/MySQL environment.

I am really quite happy with my present position but I might be persuaded to leave it if something interesting became available in the Northern Arizona, Southern Utah, or the Four Corners area. Everyone has their price and mine is the Grand Canyon... I admit that I am addicted. I find the whole concept of telecommuting extremely interesting and if I could live somewhere out there and work anyplace else via computer and modem, well, I guess I will cross that bridge when I come to it. For more info about what I do and have done you can check out my resume. It's actually quite a bit out of date and has not been updated in several years now. I really should do that someday.

In September, 1998 we went to Hawaii for a two week vacation with some friends. The photos from that trip can be found here. Check out the photos from my new toy, a Nikon CoolPix 900 digital camera. It's amazing how stuff gets so old so quick on the Net. The Nikon CoolPix 900 met an untimely demise by falling into a creek in the Grand Canyon. It was replaced with a Nikon CoolPix 950 and then a Nikon CoolPix 4500. I still have that CoolPix but now I've also done through a Nikon D70 digital SLR and currently enjoy working with both a D80 and D200.

If you live in New England and like to hike, check out my White Mountain Explorer.

I am of Lithuanian descent (100%, both sides) and very proud of it. After years of occupation and ruthless oppression against Lithuania and Lithuanians nothing made me happier than to see that "evil empire" (the only two words ever spoken by President Reagan said that I ever agreed with), the Soviet Union, crumble to dust. Lithuania has finally started to recover from these years of oppression and even has a presence on the World Wide Web.

Here are links for some servers in Lithuania:
INFORMATION ABOUT LITHUANIA
LITHUANIA HOME PAGE
Academic and Research Computer Network LITNET WWW Server
Vilnius University
Kaunas University of Technology (KTU)
Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas
Lithuanian Information Institute (in Lithuanian)
Open Society Fund - Lithuania
Seimas (Parliament) of the Republic of Lithuania (in Lithuanian)
Peace Corps Lithuania
US State Department: Travel information for Lithuania
US State Department: Human rights in Lithuania
CIA World Factbook Entries for Lithuania
Omnitel - a Lithuanian Internet provider
A map of Lithuania

Some of my other activities are:

• Hiking and Backpacking - All of the actual backpacking is done in the Grand Canyon, but my wife and I have also done a lot of hiking in many of the other National Park and National Forest areas, primarily in the western United States. These include:

  • Acadia National Park, Maine
  • Arches National Park, Utah
  • Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah
  • Capitol Reef National Park, Utah
  • Cape Cod National Seashore, Massachusetts
  • Crater Lake National Park, Oregon
  • Craters of the Moon National Monument, Idaho
  • Death Valley National Monument, California
  • Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument, New Mexico
  • Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
  • Haleakala National Park, Maui, Hawaii
  • Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, Hawaii, Hawaii
  • Hell's Canyon National Recreation Area, Idaho
  • Lassen Volcanic National Park, California
  • Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado
  • Montezuma Well National Monument, Arizona
  • Mount Rainier National Park, Washington
  • Olympic National Park, Washington
  • Oregon Trail National Historic Park, Oregon
  • Petrified Forest & Painted Desert National Parks, Arizona
  • Pinnacles National Monument, California
  • Redwood National Park, California
  • Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
  • Saguaro National Monument, Arizona
  • Sequoia National Park, California
  • Sunset Crater National Monument, Arizona
  • Waimea Canyon State Park and the Na Pali Coast, Kaui, Hawaii
  • Walnut Canyon National Monument, Arizona
  • White Mountain National Forest, New Hampshire
  • Wupatki National Monument, Arizona
  • Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
  • Yosemite National Park, California
  • Zion National Park, Utah

  

• Travel - Wanderlust is an expensive addiction to maintain. Luckily I can always be happy with another trip to the Grand Canyon and backpacking trips there tend to be relatively inexpensive aside from the airfare. My job requires me to travel maybe three or four weeks a year. One or two of these weeks is usually to for computer related conventions or training programs and another one or two weeks will send me to either Europe or Asia to do work at the Teradyne locations over there. My travels in Europe and Asia include:
  • London, Esher, Bracknell, England
  • Paris, France
  • Munich, Germany
  • Salzburg, Austria
  • Zurich, Switzerland
  • Milan, Italy

  • Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, Yokohama, Mount Fuji, Japan
  • Seoul, Korea
  • Taipei, Taiwan
  • Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
  • Singapore
  • Wellington and Awarowa, New Zealand

  Of all of these places Singapore is probably my favorite. It is a fantastic place to visit as long as you don't break the law. I don't think I could ever live there though, as some of the laws are a bit on the strange side, but then again, it appears to work for them.

• Photography - This started off as a hobby and now has simply become a necessity given some of my other recreational activities. I cannot go backpacking, hiking or travelling anywhere without my camera and its associated paraphernalia. Lately I have been transferring some of my best images to Kodak Photo CDs for use on my computer. I have designed my own screen saver that uses some awesome images from the Grand Canyon and other western parks.

  

• Amateur Astronomy - I love looking at the Moon, planets, stars and other types of celestial objects. My favorite pass time in this area is trying to track down faint planetary nebula and galaxies, just to see if I can really find them. This can sometimes be quite difficult given the light pollution often found in major metropolitan areas like Boston. On occasion I have been known to take my telescope with me on vacation trips out west and looking at the stars from some really dark s kies like what you find in places like northern Arizona really makes me envious of people that live there. I carted my telescope off to New Mexico during the recent apparition of Halley's Comet some years ago and obtained some fairly nice photographs of the comet.

• Cats - Cats are cool animals, if you don't mind being ignored. We currently have four of our own: Smokey and (the) Bandit, Tigger and Ashley. They are all female or at least they were at one point. Smokey is mostly grey with some tiger markings and Bandit is a Calico. Tigger and Ashley are sisters and are both all grey with some very faint (darker grey) tiger markings beneath. We were also foster parents for Mynt, my brother-in-law's cat, for about a year. Mynt is a money cat, hence the name. Mynt now has a sister and her name is Pepper... Pepper-Mynt.

• Tropical Fish - I keep two fairly large tanks (one 29 gallon and one 55 gallon) of African Cichlids from Lake Tanganyika. I have another 33 gallon tank that I keep some of the more common tropicals in: Neons, Zebras, and the such.

• Music - I like just about any type of music from classical up on through Rock & Roll, Alternative, Jazz, Blues, Country and the New Age variety. I am currently into Native American Flute Music and have most of the works done in this area by R. Carlos Nakai. Rock & Roll (mostly the older stuff) tends to be my favorite with my favorite artists here being The Moody Blues, John Denver, Pink Floyd and Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. The Alternative music comes in a close second as I really consider this to be the natural evolution of Rock. Some of my favorite groups here are R.E.M. and U2.

• Some of the organizations that I believe in and support:

  In 1980, Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray founded The Planetary Society to encourage the exploration of our solar system and the search for extraterrestrial life. We now number over 100,000 members around the world--the largest nongovernmental space organization on Earth.
  

  The Smithsonian Institution is beginning to make data and information accessible via the Internet. Several projects are being planned, including a central server which would provide a Smithsonian Home Page and access to all the SI servers.
  

  The mission of The Nature Conservancy is to preserve plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive.

  To date the Conservancy and its members have been responsible for the protection of more than 7.9 million acres in 50 states and Canada.
  

  Sierra Club Mission

  • To explore, enjoy, and protect the wild places of the earth;
  • To practice and promote the responsible use of the earth's ecosystems and resources;
  • To educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment; and
  • To use all lawful means to carry out these objectives.
    

  The Wilderness Society is the only national conservation organization that is devoted primarily to public lands protection and management issues. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., The Society employs a combination of advocacy, analysis, and public education in its campaigns to improve management of America's national parks, forests, wildlife refuges, Bureau of Land Management lands, and other natural places.
  

  The National Parks and Conservation Association (NPCA) is America's only private nonprofit citizen organization dedicated solely to protecting, preserving, and enhancing the U.S. National Park System. An association of "Citizens Protecting America's Parks," NPCA was founded in 1919 and today has more than 450,000 members.
  
  

  The Grand Canyon Trust Grand Canyon Trust is dedicated to the conservation of the natural and cultural resources of the Colorado Plateau. We advocate an ecologically responsible and sustainable balance between resource use and preservation, along with the protection of areas of beauty and solitude, where people may find relief from the pace of civilization.

  The Trust fosters and assists efforts of individuals, groups, communities and governments -- local, tribal, and federal -- to achieve this balance. To these ends the Trust employs science, economics, resource management, education, communication, and law. Our vision is of a region where generations of people and all of nature can thrive in productive harmony.
  

  The Grand Canyon Association is a non-profit organization chartered in 1932 to assist the National Park Service in meeting its visitor service and education goals at the Grand Canyon. Throughout its long history, GCA has contributed both funding and services to create educational programs, exhibits and publications, restore historical structures, and sponsor research and training.
  

  The Environmental Defense Fund is a not-for-profit environmental advocacy group with four main goals:
    (1) Stabilizing the Earth's climate,
      (2) Safeguarding the world's oceans,
        (3) Protecting human health, and
          (4) Defending and restoring biodiversity.