I have a B.S in Civil Engineering and have received my E.I.T. I currently work as an assistant hydrologist for the Santa Clara Valley Water District. I have been using GIS programs for about 2 years now; and am working on creating watershed boundaries that accurately reflect the effects of urban rain water management systems. I am a member of the Society for Conservation GIS and FWMA. I just began my masters degree program at San Jose State University where I am enrolled in the Special Emphasis program through the Department of General Engineering. My masters degree will combine water resource engineering with UNIX system administration.

In the second half of 2012 I started using open source GIS programs as a back up when ArcMAP would give me problems. As time has progressed I am finding that I am using these tools more and more, My goal is to completely switch from ESRI to Qgis (with GRASS, SAGA, OpenEV, and R fully integrated) by the beginning of 2014. I have been using many open source programs for years ( LibreOffice, VLC, HandBrake, and others ), and have decided to take the plunge. I am a new adopter of Linux, currently I am using Ubuntu 13.04. The progress is slow, but I am trying to take things one day at a time.