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Welcome to my humble homepage

I am a Chevrolet Corvair entusiast - see my 1965 Corvair Monza 4-speed coupe along with esoteric facts and details about onging restoration projects on my Corvair Web page. I recently decided it was time to acquire a Corvair for weekend/sunny day driving. My "new" 1965 spent most of its life in Georgia. There's very little rust on it and the recently rebuilt engine runs like a champ and has no leaks. All it needs is a bit of detail work and a professional quality paint job to be a contender.

How I got the Corvair bug

I took my drivers test in a friend's pristine 1967 4-door Monza 110 PowerGlide. It was blue with factory white top, front seats with factory head rests, and other seemingly unreal options. I drove a blue 1968 Monza 110 4-speed coupe in the 80's/90's (my first car purchase which I haggled ad infinitum with Jack Dempsey for - owner of the now defunct HotAir Enterprises). I always liked Jack and recently looked him up again. He's still got the gift for gab and trademark personality. The blue monster, with drive train from a '67 and various parts from all late model years never left me anywhere during 6 years of daily driving. It eventually succumbed to severe rust disease and went back to HotAir back ~1994. (I still miss the tinted glass all around).

OS is THE RIGHT THING - ultimate desktop operating system

I am a "Switcher" and began purchasing Apple laptops in May 2002 when OS X (oh esss TEN) 10.2 operating system came out. I know little about MacOS since I could never deal with a single tasking OS devoid of application memory/process protection. Since the early 90's I touched a Mac system less than infrequently. It took a friend of mine ~4 months of constantly hounding before I even took a look at Apple's completely rebuilt from the ground up OS. After a few hours of fiddling I saw the light. OS X is based on BSD UNIX and is by far the best UNIX-like desktop OS I've encountered (O'Reilly is awfully picky about categorizing it so THERE).

See my Mac OS X WWW page for more information oodles of useful tips. I've used Solaris for 12 years and Linux for more than 10 - OS X is an infinitely better deskop UNIX OS. I frequently refer to it as Lazy man's Linux because it is so much easier to deal with as a desktop OS.

I'll revive my old Apple MessagePad 120 web content and add MP2000 information at some point. Here is a summary of my Apple Newton collection.

I've also posted Cisco, Internet & UNIX, Windows and wireless (primarily 802.11b) related information that you may find useful.

About my ongoing sickness errr... industry experience

I grew up with an IBM 402, keypunch machines and an IBM system 32 in the house. After watching my father drop an entire box of punchcards on the floor, I decided then that batch processed systems were not in my future 8). The first computer I wrote code on was an Apple II (in assembly language of course) during the early 80's. Due to the exceptionally high Apple system prices, I purchased a Commodore 64.

From there I started working on CPM-based Heathkit H89's and eventually ended up going the DOS/Windows route (CPM was a far better OS than DOS back then). I purchased a Commodore 64. In ~1986 I purchased a Compaq DeskPro (which I still have in the garage (paperweight). I started using Sun OS in 1992 and Linux in 1993. I met Linus Torvalds at a DEC show in 1994 and determined there was definitely a future for the fledgling OS (thanks in great part to the efforts of Richard Stallman). My first Web server was a Linux PC running .92 version of the kernel (Slackware on floppies was all the rage then).

As for infrastructure experience, I started fiddling with 3Com 3+Open networks in the mid 1980's and then Banyan VINES in 1989 (running on a pre-10BaseT Synoptics LattisNet concentrator core). From there on to Novell NetWare (2.x, 3.x and 4.x) then OS/2 EE, Windows NT 3.5/3.51, NT 4, Windows 2000, NetWare 5.x and 6.x, 2003 and 2008 server. Now, everything runs virtualized in a "private cloud". I've run VMware ESX on an iSCSI SAN since the day driver support became available (when 3.01 came out October 2, 2006). I started banging away on IBM 61 charlie's (cluster controllers) back in ~1991 and continued deciphering more sophisticated WAN equipment such as Cisco, Livingston and Wellfleet. In 1995 I got more involved with Cisco and 3Com gear. Since ~2005, I've fiddled mostly with Juniper Networks gear of all sorts.

Note: all of my html was hand coded using the venerable vi editor from a UNIX shell account and looks great in Apple's Safari Web browser.