This is probably the 5th or 6th time I’ve started a blog. I always felt like I needed to blog with a purpose, in reality, I just want to try and post regularly. Not quite like a journal but my thoughts on random shit. I’m into a fair amount of shit, from space and weather to home automation and linguistics. The less I know about it, the more interested I am.

I’m a network engineer by trade which I remain a lifelong student. I’ve been fascinated by computers from a very young age. We checked out an Apple computer of some sort from the school library when I was in kindergarten - I think. I remember playing games on it, we would’ve had a NES and SEGA at the time, but I don’t particularly remember being much of a gamer back then. My two older brothers probably convinced me I was playing by giving me the unplugged controller.

Anyway maybe a year or two later I remember a Windows 3.1 desktop showing up at the house, monitor, maybe a printer - tons of software. I still don’t know why my parents decided to purchase such an expensive thing. My dad has since passed but my mother still has no idea how to use a computer and she’s owned one since 1993. I remember fighting for time on it, probably less because I knew what to do with it and more because everyone else wanted a turn. We were on AOL, I learned how to swap the dial up numbers when lines got busy, I eventually was introduced to the warez scene. I remember downloading everything, I remember learning how to reformat your computer. Lots of things kinda clicked for me, mostly driven by my curiosity. From about age 8 I knew I wanted to work in IT.

Straight out of high school I entered the work force at a computer repair shop, then desktop support at a hospital, a web developer, a data center technician, and most recently various hats in networking. I love the constant challenge. As soon as you figure some shit out the powers that be invent something else to confuse us or convince management that this new networking technology is a must or else we’ll be left in the dust. I’ve been around long enough to learn how to adapt to that - you’ll burn out trying to learn everything.

Especially now with this sort of hyper-converged - but not really - network/compute magic that is just supposed to work. It really depends at what level you’re working on this. I speak mostly from a service provider perspective - we are the cloud but we also use the cloud. The cloud is awesome but also sucks and everyone knows this. Lots of good arguments and counter arguments there but we might get into that another time.

Anyway, point was we’re live, we’re trying to be consistent and this is the format.