Experience
Tom Rule, aka the MaconMacGuy, has a breadth of experience that stems from a varied, non-traditional career path. His experience with coding began when he taught himself Basic on the HP2000 at UT Chattanooga, which motivated him to go outside his major and take classes in Fortran and PL/1. His history includes programming spreadsheets and Compugraphic typesetting. He became the de facto tech support person while on faculty in the Humanities Division at Chattanooga State Tech, and the campus Macintosh guru at Macon State while heading up the Music Department. While at Macon State Tom founded the James T. Bass, Jr. Center for Music Technology – a 12 station networked Macintosh lab with a full complement of music-making software and hardware (including multitrack digital audio recording well before it became all the rage).
He also spent 6 years as assistant technical coordinator for Mount de Sales Academy in Macon, where he was half of the team responsible for a 140-node mixed-platform network that included workgroup printing, multiple servers, 3 wireless notebook labs, email and webspace for every student and staff member, online library database, and other features on a completely networked campus. It was an amazingly low-cost and capable system, with no recurring license fees and remarkable stability.
Tom has over a decade of classroom teaching experience at the middle school, high school, and college levels. This includes a significant amount of curriculum development (especially in the computer training area), basically because he wanted to go way beyond the simple “button-pushing exercise” approach of the textbooks available. He currently teaches CS125 at Mercer University on an adjunct basis. You can check out the class blog here.
Other past gigs include interim technical directing at Vineville North Baptist, which included audio and video editing, computer technical support, workflow development, basic hardware and software configuration, and audio/video equipment planning……….and let’s not forget about the website maintenance and design! He also edited the graphics and did post-production on the audio for CDs produced at the church.
Tom has designed and created or edited websites for several middle Georgia businesses, all with an eye toward clean design, easy navigation, and extraordinary search-engine friendliness. Check out the portfolio for some examples.
The MaconMacGuy business grew out of Macintosh continuing education classes given at Macon State in the early 1990’s, and has since branched out into other areas (See the Services section for details). The core focus has remained the same:
Help people and businesses use
their computers & networks
to get their work done.