I was born before the 80s started so I have seen a very interesting span of history.
I joined the USAF in 1997, where I was trained to load the F-16 block 52. I remembered my boss telling me there was only one of them someone asked what if something breaks on it. I was given extra training because I knew more than the instructor about welding and they said they couldn't give me credit for training on stuff I already knew. So I got to get flight hours in a T-38, while the rest of the class was trained on stuff I learned from metal shop in high school. When they saw me fly the T-38 they said we got to get you to fly something else. Pick something from the planes we have on the base and we will fix it up to get you training hours on that. I pointed to a F-104 up on
display, that sat on the way into the base. The maintenance squadron had fun putting it back together. I got to fly that and pulled a loop de lope at a fast enough speed to break the windows all the way into Oklahoma from Wichita Falls, Texas. After that I got a short ride in the F16 we had but I told no matter what my name would not go on the
side of the plane it is a loaner. I sit got my picture with me next to the cockpit, because we couldn't film the HUD.
From there I was assigned to Misawa Japan were I got there and got in a incident with foreign personal living on the base so I got sent home and on the way I was flying from Chicago O'Hare to DC and I had the wrong altimeter so I didn't realize it was broken and I was way too high and the engine stalled out when I made the turn over the pine barrens
and while the engine cut back in before I hit the ground I was moving fast enough that I hit the ground and was thrown through the forward windshield and left in a blood of my own blood. So I was in a halo for a couple months while they decided to do surgery and fuse my neck. While that was going on I was being med boarded so see if I stayed in or got out of the military with a medical discharge. I ended up wanting to stay in and since I had been working as the Medical Admin of Flight Medicine I was let return to duty in 1998. From there I was cross trained into weather forecasting.
I got out a week before September 11 2001 to work in world trade center restaurant the restaurant at the top of the world. Before I could start the buildings came down. So I had four months of terminal leave and nothing to do. I started at Chubb Institute and got a certificate in Network Administration. Finding most jobs wanted more than that I
started at Ocean College in NJ where my terminal leave ended. I worked for about ten different staffing agencies while at College. This also included working on the NMCI (Navy Marine Corp Internet) project. I got to be a tour guild at the pentagon as part of
that while waiting for equipment. I complete my degree in December of 2005 and drove down to Florida to start at Full Sail University in Jan of 2006.
I complete my degree in 2008 to go work at a start in Louisiana, which failed within a year causing me to discard thousands of dollars worth of stuff and move to Los Angeles. I worked for Zoic as a driver and than at Activision Blizzard and Disney as a developer.
Now that Microsoft has bought Activision Blizzard, I can finally talk about what happened when I worked there. I was hired as QA tech for Modern Warfare 3 (2011 version), and I found a couple show stoppers which would have gotten me attention what ever else I did. So they told us in a fancy meeting that the way into game development was to start in QA. Then they told us none of us would be staying with the company past launch. This upset people, so much that someone who was related to one of the VIPs when and talked to someone. A week later Jeff Kaplan came to speak to us about a chance to work on world of warcraft. We we put into groups during some down time and told to come up with a new character class and to work by ourselves. Myself and two other people came up with classes they wanted us to develop further. We were put into a group to work on a Bard class my idea, we got pulled off QA work to do this. During this time, we got other tasks were Kaplan came to us and wanted feed back on this or that. One of those times he asked me if you fix any one thing what would you change? To this I said pull the colors off being per class and make the colors one multiple class gear. He said something, like gear sets? Why would you do that. I said you are out of colors and not every paladin wants to be blue and gold nor every warlock green and purple. He said interesting and had me go back to working on what I was working on. The bard class had the idea of kobold minions throwing candles at the players enemies. The problem was that the hard ware could do it ten players had ten minions but what happens when you have 10,000 players with ten minions in iron forge. Then they asked if it would work with one minion. I said it really wouldn't feel like rock star with one minion. So they took concepts and applied them to the mage. Then one of the other concepts I was talking about they said they wanted to develop which was for a MMO, they made me sign an NDA that expired when Microsoft bought them even though they had me attend the MW3 launch party and stick around as the other thing that happened was I was being listed as the Art Director for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm so the fans would no who to blame for the new art direction.
About February of 2012 the shareholders said shelve the Crystal City Divide and fire Solheim. So even though I was one of two people that was keep on after the launch I was fired and month later other was fired. That said I got a surprise when I saw my name on the collectors edition as the art director. They were not kidding about naming me the art director for the color change to all new gear. So with Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard my deal with the to develop Crystal City Divide is finally dead and I can shop it around.
In 2014 I moved across the country once again and out of country to Toronto Canada, where I worked for Stereo D on sterograophic conversion of three dee movies.
In 2015 I moved back to Florida where I have lived since.
