---

Who is Denis Thibault

This is life... working in my machine shop!

A little bit of history

I am one of the rare people that live in Ottawa that was actually born in the region. I was born in 1960 in Pointe Gatineau. My family lived in Pointe Gatineau for a short time, then moved to Hull when I was about 2 years old. I went to school in Hull up to grade 4.

Our family moved to Ottawa when I was 10 years old. It was quite an adjustment coming from a totally French neighborhood and school system. My grade 5 teacher was really dedicated, she taught me the basics of English on her own time after school.

After graduating from high school, I went to University for a couple of years, then decided that it was not for me. I then enrolled at the local community college into a computer science technologist program and graduated in 1982.

At that time, Ottawa was starting to see quite an increase in High Tech companies. We were very fortunate to have a really good placement person at the college. I can't remember how many interviews I had, but I ended up with 3 job offers. One at NRC, one at AECL and one at Northern Telecom. That was 24 years ago.

I've been working for Nortel Networks ever since. I guess I'm one of the lucky ones that has survived all these layoffs in the last few years. Knock on Wood :-)

What I do at work

As you can imagine, in 24 years, I have had numerous jobs at Nortel. I started as a support engineer for their first fully digital telephone switch, spent a few years there then moved to their technical training organization for another few years. Eventually, I moved into a senior position with the technical support organization.

I got tired of technical support and moved to manage a group, designing software tools. I eventually ended up in the Information System area of Nortel. This is where I am today.

I am a project manager for the software/hardware configuration management organization. We administer, maintain, engineer and manage the configuration management systems used throughout Nortel, worldwide. As a project manager, I spend the majority of my time planning project activities, tracking progress and negotiating with people for time, resources and money. 

What I do when I am not at work

There's more to life than work. I have a lot of hobbies and varied interests.

My Hobbies

My parents tell me that when I was little, my dad got tired with me putting nails in his good wood. So he got me a big log, a big bag of nails and even my own little hammer. By the time I was done with the log I knew how to hammer with both hands and the log was so loaded with nails that it could not be split in pieces. :-O

So you probably can figure out that I like working with my hands. My hobbies are:

• woodworking
• electronic projects
• stained glass
• gardening
• model railroading

My Other Interests

I believe that everyone that can, should volunteer some time to non-profit organizations. 

I  volunteer at local schools:

• Emily Carr middle school, helped out a couple of great teachers with the SolarQuest program. The school, has for the last 3 years, entered two cars in the regional model solar car contest in May. It's great fun, you can see some of the cars by visiting my model solar car web site. I have just completed writing a book about the whole Model Solar Car experience. If you're interested send me an email.
• Sir Henry Monroe middle school, helping out with the IEEE robotics challenge. It's a new challenge for me since I have never worked with LEGO MindStorms kits before. I'll eventually have a web page on that topic.