More About Rick Jasper

Work Background

I worked for over 18 years at IBM, the last 11 at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. I originally supported VM, but switched to AIX in 1994.

In 1996, I joined the IBM Patent Server project, which was a free service IBM provided to the Internet on January 9, 1997. The service was so well received, that IBM spun off the project in 2000, and formed a new company, Delphion, which I left IBM to join.

In December, 2002, Thomson bought Delphion and I once again worked for a big company. But alas, in April, 2006, Thomson laid me off. "Needs of the business" is the only reason they gave. I say the real reason is Thomson later bought Micropatent, a Delphion competitor (we both made patent information searchable via the web), and put the Micropatent managers in place. That started a fairly quick exodus of the major Delphion players out of Thomson, which was too bad.

Personal Background

I'm a native Californian, born and raised. I was born in Sacramento in 1955 and moved to San Jose in 1968 where I still live. I come from a family of nine kids, one older sister and seven younger brothers.

I graduated from California State University at Chico in 1981 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. I worked at IBM between April, 1982 and November, 2000, when the IBM Patent Server project spun off from IBM, into Delphion, Inc. In December, 2002, Thomson bought us and we became Thomson employees. In April, 2006, Thomson laid me off -- the first time I've ever been laid off.

I've been married since 1989 and have two kids, Melanie and Adam. Can you top this coincidence? My mother, my wife, and my daughter all share the same birthday, June 20th.

Here is a sorted list of family birthdays & anniversaries.

Here is "A Spectator's Guide to Water Polo", both a 3-page Quick Start and the bigger, 55-page full guide. It's a great summary of the rules for us novice parent spectators.

Raison d'etre

My family. My wife Kathy, and the kids, Melanie and Adam. Click here to see & get the big, 2.3MB picture.

When not at work, I like to

	Play bridge. Here are the ACBLand local San Jose chapter's web sites. Here are the highlights of my bridge career, mostly my gold point wins. Here are my bridge "Cheat Sheets" from a class I once taught in PDF format (252 KB) or PostScript format (7 MB). And finally, my favorite bridge hands.
	Solve Sudoku puzzles. I like this free Sudoku solver, simplesudoku.
	Pretend I'm a master wood craftsman. In reality, I just dabble in my garage, but one day (probably in my retirement) I hope to have the time to have a full shop and play to my heart's content.
	Research my family tree using Broderbund's Family Tree Maker software. See my pages with them.
	Favorite Songs They're Coming To Take Me Away!!
	Study a mail-order locksmith course I'm taking from Foley-Belsaw.

You can send me e-mail, or if you prefer snail-mail, my home mailing address is

------  Home  ------            ------ Phones ------
Rick Jasper                     Home  (408) 227-2856
139 Farnham Court               Cell  (408) 398-9065
San Jose, CA  95139

This page was last updated: Monday, 18-Dec-2006 20:34:07 Pacific Standard Time