About Cy Comer

Personal Info

11/26/19 OK well now I feel like I should keep this site just to see how far I've come. Moved Ana and I to the DFW area in 2012 after she got pregnant and we realized just how impossibly far away from family we were. I'm still 4.5 hours from my parents but close enough to spend a weekend. We found a great church and jobs are plentiful here. Politics are better. I should mention we are not in actual Dallas even though I work there often. Politics in actual Dallas are terrible. We now have 3 kids and that experience has been about the most enjoyable and fulfilling thing I've ever had the privilege to do. I still look forward to getting older every birthday.

5/3/11 I'm a systems engineer and I know I know this site isn't exactly cutting edge. It was started back in '01 and was good ol' strait html. That's really not an excuse either but this was way before wordpress and drupal and now I'm just blown away with what you can have done automatically for you. Anyway the blog has transitioned to wordpress and I'll continue to update that. For everything else there's facebook, twitter, gchat, and basically all the reasons why I never put my phone down anymore. So if you don't follow me on one of those mechanisms here's what my wikipedia page might say.
Cy Comer (born 1978) is an American Brazilian systems engineer that after purchasing his domain name and building a website about himself realized he didn't want every single event published to the world. He's traveled the world but most of the events of those travels were taken down for privacy sake. Heck he didn't even give out his full birthday or middle name. He WILL say that he met the love of his life while working in Brazil and was married in August of 2010 and couldn't be happier. He lives in Hartford Connecticut but this is a far cry from the Texas panhandle that he grew up in. Being a "flaming conservative," whatever that means, probably doesn't help in that respect. He does get along well with everyone though and has great times playing football, soccer, basketball, and frisbee with his current crop of friends. There are things to do and see in Connecticut and the surrounding area. He is trying to do as much as he can before eventually heading back to Texas and any family that is still there.

Work Info

11/26/19 I think I worked at ING till 2014 when I was laid off and I really should have quit before that. I was always responsible for the uptime of a system and that just really wore me out when I should have started sooner on the Developer/Architect role which I did on the ServiceNow platform since then. ING actually introduced me to ServiceNow and ITIL and that has since been the tool I implement to serve my fellow man. They give me little certificates of appreciation when I do a good job. This is the way I talk to my kids now when I'm trying to explain work and money. I love doing stuff like that. ING was the last time I was an employee so it's been a good 5 years that I've been on my own. I do not miss employee evaluations. I though I had the contractor thing figured out but I'm now embarking on a venture to expand an offshore ServiceNow development shop into the US market. So I'll be on the sales and delivery side of the industry soon. The name is BangMetric and you read about it here first. That's like a whole career of updates since my last post I feel like. 

5/3/11 Seven years later and still at ING. Is that right? I still moved around quite a bit until I moved to Hartford 4 years ago. The department I was in no longer exists and I've had 9 bosses but I've always done the same thing believe it or not. I've certainly learned and done much in that time but the original system I was hired to administer, Actuate, is still one of the systems I manage. The team I'm on now also manages Business Objects, Informatica, and OpenPages. It's abbreviation is PARIS Packaged Applications Reporting and Integration Services. I'm really proud of the systems we work on for providing easy and quick access to reports and data that now has a great record for availability.
We're still ING as well till the company changes its name soon. Not sure yet what that will be but we won't be part of the Dutch parent company anymore.

4/26/04 OK, from the date of the last update I guess I haven't updated this page in over a year. Quite a bit has happened since then. In November of '03 I quit working at CoreData/Concord/First Data. Just a month short of 3 years and being 75% vested. Not a huge loss there. I went out on my own as an Actuate Consultant for the next 9 months and it has been one of the greatest experiences I've had. The pay was great. Don't let anyone ever tell you that you won't make money working for yourself because you have to pay so much more in taxes. Having your own business grants you one huge advantage, Business Expenses. Anyway, this was with ING, a Dutch company that wanted to implement Actuate for some of it's reporting needs. I traveled to Hartford, Atlanta, and Minneapolis to get all of done so I lived in hotels for about 6 months. In the end it was decided that these implementations needed to be part of a broader Enterprise wide implementation instead of what was looking like a hodge podge of independent solutions. The Business Intelligence department of ING's Technology Management Office was formed for this reason to architect, design, and implement delivery of business information throughout ING. I was asked to be part of this 3 person team as the Actuate expert. It was a task that seemed way over my head at the time and still is I think but I thought I needed a challenge and it would be nice to settle down for a while so I accepted the position. As of today I still haven't settled down but I am certainly challenged daily. It's fun though. Since we are so small right now I work closely with my boss and the Business Objects expert on designing this new architecture and gathering bids for future projects almost like a start up company.

4/17/03 It looks like Concord may merge with First Data. So the name of the company I work for may change again. 

10/1/02 Ok now the company I work for is officially called. Core Data Resources, Inc. A Concord EFS, Inc. Subsidiary. whew that's a name all right. 

I'm about to not work for Core Data Resources anymore, That's because we will become a subsidiary company of another Electronic Funds Transfer company, Concord. It seems eventually we will handle all the ATM processing and bank card issuing for the smaller banks. Concord will be the issuer for large banks like Bank One and Bank of America. I mean really big banks. Our niche is for ATM processing and Issuance. I'm excited about this. Everyone that works here including the management will still remain and we are not going to be relocated. Thank goodness cause the HQ for Concord is in Memphis. What this really all boils down to is that I will be even busier at work than usual. Another co-worker just came to me today and said that they want to know more about Actuate cause the boss said they need to if they want reports for their applications. That will be nice. Up until now there was only one other person in the company that knew anything about Actuate. 

A little more about what I do: Core Data is a business that processes ATM transactions for banks and other individual owners of ATM's. Businesses log onto our website and can check on the status of their ATM's and get reports on all the transactions. My job is working with the software, Actuate, that does these dynamic online reports.

I am also in the United States Marine Corps Reserve. I recently transferred to the Individual Ready Reserves so I don't do the drill weekends anymore.

Before Core Data, I worked for Texas Tech University creating web pages and maintaining the library's website as well as some desktop support.