Our volunteer for this month is Larry Mathews (with 1 “t”), who leads the Quicken Study Group twice a month.  Larry is a lawyer with a unique law  specialty in the US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas.   We’ll tell you about that in a minute, but first let’s talk about the role of  computers in his life.

Larry purchased his first computer in the late 70’s - a Radio Shack Model I – and used it to teach himself BASIC programming and the TRS 80 operating system. He has progressed from there to where he now has a self-built computer at home, and his career assignment is tightly integrated with cyberspace.

Larry first heard about Alamo PC when Microsoft was unveiling Windows 95.  At first – like a lot of us, including this writer – he only read the magazine and attended the monthly meetings.  Later on he got more involved (I have also, and maybe you will too!), and has been teaching the Quicken classes since around 1999.

I asked him – as I usually ask the volunteers – if he spent much time with e-mail and the internet.  But the question was a little redundant since I already knew he had a special assignment on the job related to that.  I’ll get to that in a minute.  He estimated that he spends about 10 hours a week using the internet. He uses e-mail and the internet at the office and also at home.  At home he also especially uses Quicken and Eudora (an e-mail client).  His  reason for using Eudora was very logical, considering his job – it has less vulnerabilities than Outlook.  In other words hackers don’t have as many open doors to exploit as they do with Outlook Express.  I don’t use Outlook Express for the same reason: prevention of viruses and of  computer invasions.

You’re probably wondering by this time (at least I hope so!) what in the world Larry does at work with computers.  Well, he has two titles in the US Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas: he is Chief of the Criminal Division, and also currently serves as Computer Crime Coordinator.  He says he especially enjoys keeping up with networking and system vulnerabilities, and with figuring out what an intruder has done and how he has done it. So one way computers have changed his life is to give him a unique special assignment at work, that of  Computer Crime Coordinator for the US Attorney’s Office.

Larry has two things to say about the future of Alamo PC.  One is that we need to get serious about  getting new members, and the other is that it will soon be time for us to consider giving classes over the internet. The second idea especially intrigues this writer, since I do that in another subject at the local community colleges, and the concept is astoundingly popular.

So now you know better the person who volunteers to teach the Quicken class for Alamo PC – Larry Mathews.