An all-around nerd since birth, got hooked on Unix early in college. Cut my teeth on a SCO Unix system (the "good" SCO) and on NeXTSTEP (the NeXT systems OS). When I started with Linux, the only decision I had to make was what to download first, the "boot" or the "root" diskette image. :)

My general mantra for work and life in general is "if I have to do something more than a couple times, automate as much or all as possible." The time saved by having the computer do the boring stuff correctly pays double dividends in keeping mistakes out of the final product AND reducing the operations work of troubleshooting the new problems each time.

BUT that is balanced with the human aspect for both co-workers and family. It does no good to make a highly automated solution that only one person in the organization can understand much less evolve and support. I'd rather have a half dozen system perform a complex task knowing that they have defined points of contact - not a complicated interaction with no human points for debugging.

Over the past 20 years I've been a network and security geek on Cisco systems, I've been a general "jack-of-all-trades" consultant in the IT industry, produced Perl and PHP tools (small and large) for customers and personal projects, worked on Solaris, HP, AIX, RedHat, Debian, and too many other Unix systems to mention. I'm directly working on virtualization and system automation tools while dabbling into containerization of applications and systems.

In my spare time I'm a father of two intelligent kids, as well as a husband to an intelligent and beautiful wife. After chores are done, if I need a break I am continuing to teach myself digital electronics using the Arduino platform.