Background:

Father: Lowell Ormand, aero/mechanical engineer and Air Force Lt. Col., retired, the son of Oklahoma pioneers.
Mother: Barbara (Welch) Ormand, homemaker (an honorable occupation), deceased, the daughter of Tucson pioneers
Born in Tucson, when Tucson was a much smaller town.
Married to Jerri (Norton), two daughters, Charity and Faith (see the Family Activity page).

As near as I can tell, most/all of my roots are south of the "Line", so I consider myself an honorary "son of Dixie", even though (courtesy of the Air Force) I grew up in Ohio (Wright-Patterson AFB), California (Edwards AFB), and Virginia (Bolling AFB). That is, everywhere but the actual South!

Education:

High School: West Springfield, Virginia. Received the Industrial Arts award for my class.
Undergraduate: University of Arizona, College of Liberal Arts, BS in Astronomy and Physics.
Extracurricular: Role-Play games, primarily "Dungeons and Dragons" and "Traveller" (I think I did a pretty good job as Gamemaster).
Graduate: University of Arizona, College of Engineering, MS in Electrical Engineering (Controls/Communications).

I cherish my Liberal Arts education. Unlike the common contemporary view, I believe education is NOT just job training, but should be primarily character development. Maybe this is not possible in today's university setting.

Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha of Arizona.

Professional Experience:

I have been a Systems Engineer at Raytheon Company for 32 years. My actual experience has been software engineering.
TOW missile and Ground (Tripod/HMMWV) and Bradley Fighting Vehicle launchers, Tomahawk Cruise Missile, and a bit of factory automation, both in a Post Office project and in support of Tucson factory operations.

I've dealt in Assembly (TMS9900, PowerPC, LC4516C), C (DOS, Windows 3.1, Unix, PowerPC, TMS320F2812 DSP), C++ (Windows NT), Ada (PowerPC and SunOS).
FPGA design: Schematic Capture and Altera HDL, enough VHDL to review other people's work.
DoD-standard software development process, as both developer and team lead.

I am retired from Raytheon, and now employed at Marcus Engineering as an Embedded Engineer, helping with embedded processor designs (mostly Microchip PIC, since ME is a Microchip Partner) for demo units, prototype products, and manufacturing designs.

The Really Important Stuff:

I am a believer and follower of Jesus of Nazareth. Here's why.