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I'm just a professional geek spending my days thinking about information security in a world of automation, where one minor parameter could expose your corporate data to open access by anyone, litarally in the world.

I'm also spending time testing out various fully homomorphic encryption libraries with an eye toward building automated tools to encrypt a data set so that large batch processing can be done on rented hardware without the data ever being unencrypted. Think of the monthly, quarterly and annual batch jobs that get run to generate sales commission reports and payments or a large General Ledger reconciliation.

I started my programming life (among so, so many other lives I've lived) on Radio Shack Trash-80, er, I mean TRS-80 Model II's, while hanging out in the local Radio Shacks in Natchez, MS. At my brief attempt at Uni, I was a vocal performance major (that's opera to laypeople) and realized that as a baritone I would always be scrounging for parts, since there are no well-known baritones. I mean if Plácido Domingo switches from tenor to baritone and quckly back to tenor again, what hope is there for normal mortals without his kind of connections. While at uni, I got my own TRS-80 Color and delved into OS/9 a bit. I was the first Music Department student to be granted a computer center account so I could print. It was truly a dark age.

I picked up a bit of dBase II before I left uni, and also worked a short stint as a hospital based EMT. Then while working a job connecting high school students with summer job/training opportunities brought me into contact with a 4GL RDBMS called DataFlex. After some training at Data Access Corp, the DataFlex publisher, I landed a job in their Information Resourcees department before transitioning to Tech Support/Training. While doing tech support and teaching advanced traing courses, I was teaching myself C in my spare time. I eventually moved to the Product Development department, porting the DataFlex character-mode language from MS-DOS to 27 Unix variants on all types of hardware, from small micros to large minis that look like pairs of current size racks.

My Linux days started with Slackware on 3 floppies, from which I cobbled together rudamentary firewalls to utilize the then current 1200bps downlink/300bps uplink modems of the day. After I left Data Access, I started with Cove Systems, a DAC customer that publishes a distribution management vertical written in DataFlex. There I continued work connecting the DataFlex language to the FairCom Server and wrote interconnection API's for software that did not yet have access APIs. At Cove, we settled on SCO Unix before they were purchased, then transitioned to Red Hat. I switched over to Fedora at Core 2 after I left Cove. I've been happily building Fedora boxes ever since, with the occassional instance of Debian, Ubuntu or Raspian.

I have commercial experience writing in C/C++, Java, Javascript, bash and its predecessors link csh and ksh, python, perl and DataFlex. I've done a bit of work with Visual Basic and C# under duress.

I'm afraid I'm one of the people who loath Windoze and think Apple OSs have never been the least bit intuitive. On most any Unix or Linux box, or Android phone, I can quickly make the device do whatever task I desire. Windoze and Apple products are anything but easy to me. It is like both go out of their way to make anything but the most basic task as difficult as possible. OS/2 2.1 was a major improvement in multitasking over Windoze in its day. I do though realize that I don't think the same way as most people, and that leads me down certain paths. What I think is a simple, easy to understand and use interface, other people often consider daunting to grasp. At DAC I taught one beginner course and we all realized that it wasn't my bag. I literally have no recollection of what first aproaching a computer was like, so I just don't relate to beginners in a way to that I help them. I'll explain something three or four ways, including some why you want to might do it a given way, after that I tend to start losing my patience.

In the non-geek categories, I enjoy photography, gardening and a bit of cooking. Before digital cameras, I always shot 35mm slide file because it made for better poster size prints. South Florida climate makes gardening a breeze at propogating plants. A huge portion of plants here can be propogated from either a stem gutting or reproduce by producing pups. I love orchids but keep forgetting to mist them enough during our relatively dry winters.

In my childhood I helped my maternal grandfather, who was a butane then propane salesman and delivery driver during the week and a Southern Baptist preacher on Sundays, add bathrooms, running water for kitchens and baths and propane gas for heating and cooking to rural shacks in southwest Mississippi. Then I learned better carpentry skills and residential and industrial electrical wiring from my step father. For anything other than A/C, sewer line repair (Grosss!) and automotive maintenance, I first try to fix it myself. I never took the time to learn the ins and outs of building digital circuitry, this I can put together a screamer of a computer. I just don't try to fix a card that gets flakey. With cars it's gas, oil, fluids and water, and an occassion reading of the ODB-II computer report. Beyond that, I have no interest in the process so don't even try, since I tend to more often break something instead of making it better.