About

My name is Vic Simkus and that is me in the comically over-sized chair.  Couple more pounds and that chair will be just the right size AMIRITE?!

I started my professional life in the computer biz in the 90s.  Those were fun times.  Had the distinct pleasure to work with all sorts of various systems that were fighting for dominance back in the day – HP, Sun, NeXT, SGI, DEC Alpha.  Naturally I remain a *nix fan to the day.  I even used to administer Novel systems!

I’d say that my most proud and rewarding work was for Department of Neurology at UIC (University of Illinois at Chicago) where I had the honor of helping people much smarter than myself process fMRI data using a whole slew of custom software in a parallel computing environment.  Someone even felt sorry for me and gave me an authorship credit on a research paper!  That’s right, technically, I am a published author (big air quotes around that!).

Somewhere along the way I wrote an electronic medical records system.  See the project here.  I take credit only for the software development work.

After about 20 years of that I flipped the script and went to trade school for heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and refrigeration.  As part of the script flipping I moved to Louisiana where I fell into industrial refrigeration.  Ammonia based refrigeration to be exact.

While in the industrial sector I really started to like the controls side of things.  It meshed perfectly with my computer background but with the added zing of the computers controlling real physical things.  Like 400HP screw compressors, for example.  Or a warehouse full of equipment that keeps all the food you buy at the store at the right temperature.

The controls world led into me dabbling with electrical engineering (term used very loosely here) which resulted in my home automation/Vic’s IO board project.  I went from nothing to designing PCBs and having them manufactured in China.  And here’s the kicker – it mostly works!

If you wish to contact me I’m at vic.simkus@simkus.com.  If you wish to have a beer I’m generally in the Baton Rouge area.