welcome

I'm a 30 something geek originally from Perth, Western Australia, now living in Vancouver, Canada. I've had a webpage online continuously since 1995. I have a fun homepage, but felt I should do something a bit more professional with this domain.

Geek wise, I do a lot of stuff. I have 10+ years experience with administrating Windows and Unix servers (debian, RedHat, Ubuntu, Slackware, Solaris, IRIX), 5+ years of hands-on Cisco administration, 10+ years of networking and fixing computers (hardware/software/mac/pc/sun). I have 8 years developing Web applications, using mainly Perl and PHP, but also C and even shell scripts. I know MySQL and Postgres pretty well, as well as generic SQL. I do security administration, analysis and penetration testing. I'm currently working in a vmware infrastructure role at a University, and I enjoy the collegiate atmosphere. Remarkably, I don't hate the students. They keep me grounded in what is important.

As well as specialised University IT security, I'm really interested in designing and engineering networks and systems specially suited to provide service for higher education institutions.

experienced in (at jan 2010)...

skill strength years
SAN Administration (NetApp, Sun, Brocade) Advanced 4+
vmware ESX Advanced 4+
UNIX Administration (Linux, Solaris, IRIX) Expert 10+
Windows Administration Advanced 10+
LAN Administration Expert 10+
PC, Mac, Sun Hardware Expert 10+
Web Applications Development Expert 9+
DNS, DHCP, Apache, NTP, SSH, SSL Expert 9+
Wireless LAN Expert 7+
Academic Computing Strategies Expert 7+

aims in work?

I really like sharing knowledge and providing a quality IT experience to students. Students shouldn't have to put up with poor quality support and systems, and I like doing anything I can to fix this.

vendors

I like the products that these guys make, and know them pretty well.

non computing interests

As well as my hard core geek interests, I also know a fair bit about pre-press, and have been using Photoshop for about 13 years. I'm also interested in photography, and am on to digital camera number 5 since 1998, a Canon 450D. I also loved photography in high school, with SLR Pentax K1000 cameras.

I spent a year living in Canada in 1998/98, and have been back in 2002, 2003, 2006 and 2007. I went to Japan in 2003, 2004 and 2007 and have also been to The United States in 1998, 1999, 2002, 2007 and 2009, as well as various trips to Switzerland, Austria, France, Hong Kong, Singapore and England. I've also touched down in South Korea once. I like to travel.