About

Before becoming a veteran of the first dot-bomb, multiple dot-coms, and a smattering of enormous slothful enterprises, I thought I would become a computer animator.  I learned BASIC programming on an Atari 800 by typing out programs from A.N.A.L.O.G. magazine including the awesome Solid States 3-D plotting program.  That coupled with seeing the 1984 movie The Last Starfighter in theaters really gave me a life long preoccupation with computers.

I didn't end up as a computer animator.  In my University studies delved into computer vision and image recognition.  This got me playing with some Cray super computers and cabinets full of Silicon Graphics Onyx servers. While the work on early Virtual Reality systems, OpenGL, and MIPs assembly were educational, I found I had a better knack for network and server administration.  

This lead a string of jobs at regional ISPs.  The first of which still ran a 1970s-era time-sharing microcomputer in the basement that customers connected to over 160 baud dumb terminals.  Between personal and professional use, I've networked computers with everything from 300 baud audio couplers, modems from 1200 - 56k baud, frame relay, ISDN, fractional T-1s, ADSL, SONET, ARCNET, thicknet, thinnet, 1 Mbit - 10 Gbit Ethernet, X.25, and various alphabets of WiFi.  But I am not a network engineer.

My day job usually gets simplified down to System Administrator.  I now grow and manage teams of folks to maintain distributed systems frequently on someone else's computers; aka the Cloud.  I don't miss racking and stacking equipment in data centers, but can and have built those out when it makes sense.  

When I'm not working, I enjoy music (playing and listening), the melodrama of Formula 1 racing, getting some track time behind the wheel, and writing.  I used to watch a lot of movies, but I no longer have any time for that, but I generally don't mind given the reason.