About me

2007 - Present

I am a boring father of teenaged triplets. They are the joy of my life. I still occasionally run or climb a mountain.

1996 - 2007

A rather adventurous period! I was really into peak bagging/mountaineering, attending interesting training courses, and running marathons and ultramarathons – preferably on trails.

1992 - 1996

I served in the United States Air Force as enlisted. I was a B-52H/B-1B/B-2A Offensive Avionics technician (AFSC was 456x0 then 2A553A, which is called something else now) where I worked on cool aircraft and other platforms in a high-security, nuclear environment. I specialized in communications, navigation (INS and GPS), radar, low-light and FLIR sensors, and bomb/cruise missile targeting systems.

I worked in the Nuclear Personnel Reliability Program and held a security clearance.

Technology

I started dabbling in programming when I was 8 years old on a then state-of-the-art TRS-80 Model III. I later worked my way through a bunch of 8-bit platforms, including Timex-Sinclairs, Ataris, and Commodores, before settling on a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 😔. I got a modem and things happened and I discovered UNIX, VMS, and X.25 networks.

In my later teen years, I started using an Amiga 500, which was an amazing computer and platform. In about 1991 or so, I discovered I could run this new OS call Minix on my Amiga. This involved constantly swapping floppies amongst 2 or 3 disk drives. Fun stuff.

Shortly thereafter, a guy named Linus Torvalds posted a message to a newsgroup announcing his new toy OS and I bought a PC…