Pretty much raised in a small town computer store/CLEC NOC. Had a dial-up BBS at home at age 11 or so.
Spent a few years as the lead NOC guy supporting DSL subscribers, WISP clients and especially a multi hub and spoke Cisco VOIP architecture built on CLEC provisioned lines from then Qwest, within a handful of SMB/municipal government offices around the reaches of the 970 area code.
Later, studied some Mandarin in college in my late 20s but quit because I was turning down work to accumulate debt.
Spent a year consulting Linux support for some interesting organizations prior to taking a job as a Linux administrator at HostGator in Houston, TX where I had lots of fun providing test code to repeat ticket opening php devs who's refrain, 'the server is broken,' defied most administrators sense of civility.
Didn't spend long there, was recruited to Boston Technologies as lead operations engineer when the original product architect walked. I was one of about 5 BT employees that survived the transition to Forexware when the inevitable/REDACTED out of professionalism happened. I am proud of my successes there but in opsec/devops, as in most things, it's far easier to measure failures where stuff does happen than measure the success of what failures you were able to pre-mitigate, or however best to put it.
I'm out on a limb currently having fallen into a gap of unemployment during the COVID outbreak in the middle of preparations to pursue whitewater guide work overseas.
Currently attempting to consummate my long time tech career background work as a security researcher and journalist by publishing my online magazine via a distributable and transparent social networking architecture and DevOps framework I've architected over the years. Last time I got close, shortly after the outbreak, my minimalist Linux from scratch style desk was somehow hacked and my work/access to backups presumably stolen. People showed up at my should have been anonymized location asking for me by my handle, which while isn't intended to be a secret, isn't a thing shared offline except in specific, tight, company.
It was pretty harrowing, it remains that way. Currently if I attempt to use Facebook or LinkedIn for any reason there is an 'unusual activity,' setting flipped and thus, I am effectively banned from both platforms. My suspicion is that I am the target of some advanced on-cloud malware which platform support is incapable of acknowledging let alone fixing.
At least it feeds me some interesting security research to report on.
Currently looking for work that I would be a good fit for.. CTO where bare-metal data center and Telco operations are taking place would be a good fit.
