Intro

Jan. 15th, 2037 10:52 am
jonw: (Default)
[personal profile] jonw
Hello,

This is a sticky post, so pay no mind to the date on it.

I live on beautiful Vancouver Island - the warmest place in Canada. I have now, and have always had, dogs. I am a Linux systems guy that has been working in cybersecurity for about 10 years. I am a GenXer and in late career that has worked remotely from my house, wherever that has been, for over a decade. I have lived for significant amounts of time in Ontario, Alberta, Nova Scotia, and now I intend to live the rest of my days out on the island.

My first hands-on tech was a Commodore Vic 20 that my parents bought in the early 80s. That lead to Windows 3.0 on 6 disks, then to running several BBSes in the 80's and 90's participating in several FTNs in addition to the grandaddy Fidonet. I still ocassionally fire up a BBS, telnet these days, to play door games I loved like LoRD and to check in on the seemingly never-ending bun fight in the Fidonet SysOp echoes. I even once wrote a bridge between Fidonet and forum software because that was so much easier to navigate than your typical BBS echo set up. I even got boingboinged (way cooler than slashdotted, imo).

I then went to college for a computer diploma which was the only option outside of "computer science" at the time, discovered ColdFusion when the web became functional and set up my first Linux server for my personal email in my basement using some early Debian. Laptops came on the scene then but wifi was not functional unless you could get the Windows firmware binaries running. At the time that was accomplished using ndiswrapper and the only distro I could get that to work with was Fedore Core 4. Ubuntu was yet to come out, and when it did I switched to it and have rarely looked back.

I landed my first actual full-time Linux sysadmin job around 2005 and that has been my career trajectory ever since. I grew up with the indie web because there were no Googles, Facebooks, etc. I have come back to it because living through the centralization of a decentralized system is both painful and terrible to behold. I do not know why humans view each other as prey, as things to be exploited, but we do and the surveillance aparatus that the internet has morphed into sucks.

I also have an addiction to motorcycles. Not a "I want to go fast and die in a fierey crash" addiction, I'm more into big cruisers. But I probably will die in a fierey crash regardless.

On a non-technical side, at various points along the way I became a Freemason, a Canadian Armed Forces veteran, and a very amateurish writer.


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