portia shao

"I have never felt comfortable having pictures taken of me, and have seldom been happy with them. I was apprehensive about the session. Portia put me immediately at ease; I was amazed at how happy I was with the shots she took, and the work she did on them..." "My father was a photographer and could never get a good shot of me. He said I didn't photograph well. True enough, every professional photo I've had taken over my 30 year career was, at best, "o.k." or "decent". After having to pose for my critical dad, I learned to hate cameras and would cringe when I had to be in a shot. Then I found Portia online. She put me at ease, made me feel much less self conscious and...miracle of miracles...my pictures are beautiful! She was able to capture the very best of "me" I really want everyone to feel this way! My camera loves you!

From Software developer to Technical Product Manager to Product Manager of the enterprise email product at Sun which had many names over the years! At the time I quit, it was Sun One Messaging Server. I knew a thing or two about email, IMAP, SMTP and other alphabets.

Software engineer working on email interconnect product called PMDF on Digital Equipment Corp's VMS operating system.

Do you remember dBASE? Well, my job then was to port dBASE from PC's to the Digital Equipment Corporation's popular VAX/VMS system, a mini-computer which might have had 2MB of main memory in those days! It's during this time that I started to take art classes, drawing, painting in watercolor, which eventually lead to photography that I am doing now.

So long ago! I was a systems programmer, systems manager for VAX/VMS computers, programmed in assembly language, wrote some device drivers. I enjoyed most the part of system manager job where I supported users of the computers in solving problems, monitored and tuned systems performance and attended DECUS! Internet was small then, I got my first email account and social networking then was to read the newsgroups.