|
| About the Webmaster / SAL Commander / Detatchment Asst. Sergeant-At-Arms |
|
Jonathan Robert Frank Cooke
|
|
|
Jonathan Cooke is the webmaster of Post137.com. Jonathan designed this website in its current form in November of 2006. Prior webmasters include Hal Helms, and Greg Lovejoy.
Since moving to the United States from Lincolnshire, England, Jonathan has been involved with Information Technology since 1983, and has been a software application developer and technical analyst at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida since 1998 where he has created numerous intranet and Internet applications and websites such as Medicare.fcso.com which serves the over 90,000 Medicare providers in Florida, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. In addition Jonathan has designed and/or maintains a variety of intranet and Internet websites that have current combined traffic of approximately 18 million hits per year.
Jonathan Cooke is Commander of Squadron 137, Post Webmaster, and Asst. Sergeant-At-Arms, Northern Area, for the Detatchment of Florida.
|
|
Technical background:
Jonathan started working with computers at the age of 13 in 1983, in Stamford Connecticut learning BASIC on both a 1.0 MHz Apple IIe and a 1.77 MHz Atari 800XL at home. In 1984 at Oakwood boarding school in Poughkeepsie New York he learned VM/CMS and APL on an IBM System/370 mainframe. He also learned PC-DOS and BASICA on a 4.77 MHz 8088 IBM-PC model 5150. In 1985 he became the Sysop of the school's 1200 baud Bulletin Board System, Oaknet, for which he wrote customized compiled QuickBASIC mods from RBBS-PC source code. In 1986 he and a friend, Jim Nowack, ran Land of Dementia BBS running at 2400 baud in New Windsor New York on a Tandy 1000 A. The tight-knit BBS community of Poughkeepsie and Newburgh met regularly at gatherings and parties and produced several people who went on to illustrious careers, such as Drew Olbrich of DreamWorks fame. It is worth mentioning at this point that Jonathan did not spend any time with a war-dialer learning various operating systems by hacking into commercial computers during the evening hours. That did not happen at all. The closest he came to a brush with the law was that his most beloved personal computer at the time was a Compaq Portable which he optimized by replacing the 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 chip with an 8 MHz NEC V20 chip, installing an Intel C8087 math coprocessor chip and replacing the Compaq BIOS with a Phoenix BIOS chip. It also had the factory 20MB HDD replaced first with a Seagate ST-238R RLL drive, then later with a Seagate ST251-0 MFM HDD dual-partitioned to run like an ST-251-1, a Zuckerboard memory expansion card and the single full height 5.25" FDD replaced with 2 half heights. This beautiful machine was subsequently lost by a girl who just simply forgot about it, "Oh I left it somewhere, but it's not there now, huh. Oh well. " at which point a terrible violence was contemplated but never enacted, thus allowing Mr. Cooke to continue his life without having committed a capital murder offense. Grr. Anyway, now living in Jacksonville Florida he launched Land of Demenia II with his friend Joseph Lauwereins on an 80286, soon renamed NIN BBS, then onto an 80386, then into the Pentium line until the advent of widespread ISPs declined BBS usage. He spent several years in various management roles at a variety of businesses then in 1998 went to work at Blue Cross where he administrated the Medicare Online BBS, a dialup system serving 85,000 Medicare providers. In late 1998 he created the FloridaMedicare.com website. Since 1998, working at Blue Cross Jonathan has created many web based applications and websites. Throughout his time in the information technology field he has learned and used a wide variety of programming and scripting languages including Assembly, Java, JavaScript, APL, BASIC, QuickBASIC, VM/CMS, SQL, PERL, HTML, DHTML, XML, ActionScript, Visual Basic, VBScript, VB .NET, CSS, Batch script, iDoc Script and ASP. He currently specializes in GUI design and digital imagery. After being in the field for so many years, Jonathan no longer owns a computer at home. When he gets off work, he turns into a quasi-neo-Luddite and a computer is the last thing in the Universe that he is interested in seeing.
Legionnaire membership established through:
Jonathan's American stepfather graduated from Cornell University College of Engineering in 1951, from which he holds a Masters degree in Civil Engineering. He immediately joined the military and served two years as an First Lieutenant in the United States Air Force during the Korean War until the cease of hostilities. He is now retired from a 33 year professional and business career. As an avocation he has been a student of history for 40 years, with particular interest in the Civil War. He is also a collector of Civil War books and artifacts. He is co-author of the book, "The Maple Leaf: An Extraordinary American Civil War Shipwreck" and appears in the television documentary of the same name aired on PBS. He is also past President and member of the Board of Directors of Mandarin Museum and Historical Society. He lives in the Mandarin section of Jacksonville.
Contact Jonathan Cooke on the Contact Us page.
Site Map | Privacy
|
