About
WHAT IS ABADAM.com?
A no-frills and get stuff done web & new media consulting service whose mission is to provide folks who are time-crunched and seek a tech savvy resource to help setup and keep their online projects running.
WHO IS ABADAM.com?
My name is Ruel Abadam. Abadam.com is named after me and my father and his father before him and his father before him. You get the picture. I’m also known as Ru El host of Ru El’s Running Podcast. Abadam.com is where I choose to have my consulting services live on the web.
My grandfathers were all hands-on workers. They built and created stuff. My father was the same as a visual merchandiser. You could say I grew up around creative and artistic talents. As a kid I drew and sketched and it was easy for me to sketch things I saw. I also realized my brother had the same ability and a couple of cousins in my family. As I got older, I can see nieces and my own kids express similar artistic talents. So something there does seem to get handed down.
Also growing up it almost seemed a no brainer to study art and make a living somehow in things related to graphic arts. The thing is, I didn’t want to turn what I found to be personal and fun into a job. You know the idea of once the thing you enjoy because a job or a chore, you won’t enjoy it anymore?
Then in high school my mom did her best to recommend an area of study. A direction to work towards for a career. Mom had been getting formal training for her management roles in numerous retail location at the nearby military base. I believe somewhere in her trainings she was told there would a future in working with computers. So her advice to me in the early 90’s was simply to “study computers”.
I didn’t hop at the chance to start college after high school and opted to work full-time at a photo lab. After of years of working I developed interest in both fitness and computers. So I did a ton of self-study and realized I was just hungry for knowledge. That hunger lead me to enrolling in a correspondence school for desktop publishing and design. Out of all the courses available, it was the one that peaked by interest and appealed to my artistic side. The bonus was the fact that the program included a personal computer. I completed the course and spent a lot of time learning about PC hardware and operating systems.
Long story short, I left my home town (island of Guam) to following my girlfriend (now wife) to a place where if I wanted to “study computers”, there would be more exposure and opportunity to do so. We moved to the SF Bay Area.
I worked full-time as a court records researcher running background checks on a long list of potential employees and renters. It was for my cousin’s small agency. I retrieved and reported on lots of records from courthouses either from paper files to microfiche. This public data was brought back to our office where it was manually entered in a standalone desktop PC. It was in this setting where I started into relational database systems and local area networks. I performed a bunch of self-study through books on the subject and converted the company operations from the standalone database PC station to a networked replicable database across multiple workstations. It was fun figuring things out.
Meanwhile I enrolled in degree program which had evening classes so that I could hold a full-time job and study too. I completed a bachelor’s degree in business information systems and immediately felt the need to get a masters in computer information systems through an online format.
During this educational career I moved my way around a dotcom company where I got my foot in the door as a customer service/ helpdesk specialist where I supported customers and partners of a web-based reservation system. After a year, and closer to completing a degree, I made the move to the position where I could support the development of the actually software as a quality assurance and release coordinator.
Over the years I had the opportunity to work for other companies and teams. A highlight was working with one of the Silicon Valley tech giants. It was a short-term position which I left for another company that was not a giant but has become a leader in its own space.
With school out-of-the-way I was able to find time to facilitate online courses in beginners web design and structured query language. If that wasn’t enough I studied four martial arts, created and hosted a martial arts group website.
As time went on I chose to focus on family and got married and put martial arts and web design on hold. My wife and I created a home and started a family. We have three kids now and they are a blast. The coolest thing happened around this time. I got fat. So I trained for a marathon and got fatter. Cool right? Not really. The cool part was that I started listening to podcasts about marathon training. Then over a series of various podcasts I found myself wanting to run greater than the 26.2 marathon distance. After my first successful finished at an ultra distance run, I sought out other podcast that might help me improve my running in ways that didn’t leave me fat. I needed a solution. Many other people run longer. So I needed to find out how I could do it too. I ended up listening to a podcast the put me in a lifestyle that got down to a weight I’ve not seen since high school. I live and fuel right on and off the trail, road, or treadmill. A natural healthy lifestyle. An NSNG (No Sugars No Grains) lifestyle and I celebrate the transformation and set an example on Ru El’s Running Podcast to share, try to inspire, and give back to the NSNG community as created by Vinnie Tortorich.
You see this little story isn’t so much about how I got fat then skinny and how I got inspired to run just a little longer and slower than most. It’s about the podcast platform which helped inspired me to become who I am, which ignited my need to podcast which naturally brought out my creative and artistic side.
Needless to say having spent many years working with several software development teams of talented people producing cool and some not-so-cool web and mobile applications, I’m accustomed to working with people and technologies.
If you’re looking for no frills consulting to help when it comes to your website, social media, graphic design, podcasting, and things in between? I can help.