About

I have been work­ing in, on, around, or in the depths of com­put­er net­works pro­fes­sion­al­ly for over 22 years. Before that I was pro­gram­ming, hack­ing, and just gen­er­al­ly mess­ing about with com­put­ers, modems, bul­letin boards, and net­works since I got my first com­put­er at age eight: an Apple IIc with all the accou­trements. In that time I have man­aged to break a good many things, fix many oth­er things, and have seen a lot of the good, bad, and just plain odd under­bel­lies of the com­put­er world. As such, writ­ing about some of it seems to make a cer­tain lev­el of sense.

I write, or have writ­ten, in sev­er­al pro­gram­ming lan­guages, begin­ning with LOGO on the Apple IIc, Basic, Tur­boPas­cal, C, C , Perl, Javascript, and most recent­ly Python, have been cer­ti­fied (or cer­ti­fi­able) in every­thing from Nov­ell CNE to Microsoft MCSE, to var­i­ous Cis­co cer­ti­fi­ca­tions.

I’m inter­est­ed in all man­ner of open source projects, though most­ly around Open­Stack and Open­Day­light. I’m even obses­sive enough that I’m writ­ing two of my own com­mand-line Twit­ter clients simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in C and Python–mostly because I’m a masochist I think, and I don’t sleep.

I have, until recent­ly, spent most of my pro­fes­sion­al time in a strat­e­gy role, trans­lat­ing between the busi­ness needs of my for­mer com­pa­ny and the incred­i­ble IT Team I man­aged. In March of 2014, after many years of increas­ing respon­si­bil­i­ty on the oper­a­tions side of the indus­try, I made the switch to con­sult­ing for a large sys­tems inte­gra­tor. The chal­lenges are dif­fer­ent, unique, and the pace fre­net­ic at the best of times. This expos­es me to many large enter­prise net­works, and it feeds my obses­sive need to learn.

I’m an avid watch­er of indus­try trends, and love to write about them pro­fes­sion­al­ly as well as on my hum­ble blog. In what lit­tle spare time I have, I’m inter­est­ed in sail­ing, wood work­ing, old cars, For­mu­la 1, pho­tog­ra­phy, the­o­ret­i­cal physics, my fam­i­ly, and any­thing else that I find to be fun at the time. I’m also a Dis­ney nut and if you can’t find me any­where else, start look­ing at one of the Dis­ney theme parks.

I can be found online in a vari­ety of places, scrib­bling what­ev­er non­sense comes to mind, but the two most like­ly places are my per­son­al blog and Twit­ter, along with any­one who will pay me for my wild-eyed ram­blings.