Bio

My curiosity about technology started early. Around kindergarten, my father taught me the basics of GW-BASIC on an 8088 PC, and from that point on there always seemed to be a computer somewhere in our living room. Around the same time, he gave me a Hallicrafters shortwave radio from the tube era—the kind that needed time to warm up before it came to life. I spent countless hours listening to distant voices and signals, fascinated by the idea that information could travel invisibly across the world.

I was especially captivated by number stations—mysterious broadcasts of voices, tones, and seemingly random sequences of numbers whose purpose I could only imagine. The crackle of static and distant transmissions often lulled me to sleep, and sometimes found their way into my dreams and nightmares. Together with the alien worlds and unsettling villains of Doctor Who, they left me with a lasting fascination for things that were hidden, distant, encrypted, and not yet fully understood.

As I grew older, that curiosity shifted from radio signals to computers. I started with MS-DOS 3.3 and still remember the excitement of upgrading to MS-DOS 5.0. Before I ever encountered Unix tools like awk or sed, I was finding creative ways to automate tasks using batch files and EDLIN, DOS’s notoriously primitive line editor. I spent countless hours experimenting with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, tweaking HIMEM.SYS, EMM386, upper memory managers, and every trick I could find to squeeze a little more conventional memory out of a system.

Installing a Sound Blaster card, configuring an ARCNet network adapter, resolving IRQ and DMA conflicts, or adding an Adaptec SCSI controller often meant spending hours experimenting, troubleshooting, and learning how the machine actually worked. Computers weren’t appliances yet—they invited exploration. Like many kids of the era, I spent more time than I probably should have talking to Dr. Sbaitso, amazed that a home computer could suddenly produce recognizable speech.

To afford a 486 system of my own, I worked as a dishwasher in a local restaurant kitchen and saved what I could. At the time, it felt like a major milestone. Wolfenstein 3D ran reasonably well on older hardware, but Doom was helping define a new generation of PC gaming, and a 486 felt like the machine to have. More importantly, it became another platform to explore, upgrade, configure, and learn from.

That same curiosity eventually led me into networking. I experimented with ARCNet before later moving to Ethernet, and spent time learning Novell NetWare 3.x and 4.x, Windows NT, OS/2, Linux, and BSD systems. By the mid-1990s, my friends and I were networking computers together for Doom deathmatches over IPX/SPX, learning practical networking concepts long before we understood the terminology. Looking back, many of my earliest lessons in networking came not from a classroom, but from trying to make systems communicate with one another.

As my computers became more connected, so did my world. I spent time on local bulletin board systems and eventually discovered larger communities through networks such as FidoNet. For the first time, conversations were no longer limited to people in my area code. Ideas, discussions, and friendships could travel across the country—and sometimes around the world—through a patchwork of interconnected systems.

Not long afterward, I found myself drawn into the broader Internet. Working technical support for a local Internet service provider exposed me to a rapidly growing online world of Usenet newsgroups, IRC, websites, email, and online communities. IRC networks such as EFnet—and later Freenode and Libera.Chat—became places where I learned from people around the world. Mailing lists, Linux User Groups, and open-source communities reinforced a lesson that has stayed with me ever since: some of the best learning happens when people openly share knowledge with one another.

The early Internet was more than just technology—it was a community, a culture, and a set of ideas. Through books, online discussions, and publications like Wired, I encountered the work of Richard Stallman, John Perry Barlow, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, Jaron Lanier, and many others who were asking important questions about software freedom, privacy, digital rights, virtual communities, and the social impact of emerging technologies. Organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU helped shape my understanding of the relationship between technology, civil liberties, and public discourse.

Around the same time, I discovered books such as The Cuckoo’s Egg by Clifford Stoll and The Masters of Deception by Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner. I later had the opportunity to hear Stoll speak at Dayton Hamvention. I became fascinated by cryptography and privacy, particularly the work of Phil Zimmermann and Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), even choosing Zimmermann as the subject of a school report. I also participated in distributed.net’s cryptographic key-cracking projects, contributing spare CPU cycles to a global collaborative effort that demonstrated both the power of distributed computing and the importance of strong encryption.

Looking back, many of the ideas that shaped my interests then—openness, collaboration, privacy, security, and access to information—continue to influence how I approach technology today.

That lifelong interest eventually became a profession. In the mid-1990s, I began supporting small business networks and desktop systems at a local computer shop, gaining hands-on experience with hardware, operating systems, networking, and customer support. The experience provided a practical foundation that would later expand into enterprise systems administration and infrastructure management.

My professional foundation in IT deepened significantly during my time at UC Santa Cruz, where I progressed from Tier I helpdesk support for a campus of 18,000 students, staff, and faculty to Tier II support and eventually dedicated workstation and server support for approximately 300 clients across departments including IT, Human Resources, Risk & Safety Services, Financial Affairs, the Registrar’s Office, Title IX, Police, Physical Plant, Receiving, Business Services, and the Chancellor’s Office.

Working as part of a small team, I supported enterprise environments running a wide range of applications including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Information (BI) apps like PeopleSoft, Banner, and Business Objects/Crystal Reports, ensuring client installations, database connectivity, and operational readiness for both end users and development staff. I also administered and maintained critical infrastructure supporting academic and administrative operations across the university, including a campus-wide emergency alerting system, WebCBT—the university’s primary online learning platform during the early years of web-based education—and multiple departmental database, file, print, and domain servers.

It was that experience—understanding what a resilient, well-managed IT environment looked like at scale—that I carried into my next role as IT Coordinator for a worker-owned cooperative. Supporting approximately 90 users across multiple business units—including a restaurant, bakery, bar, nightclub, manufacturing facility, catering operation, and festival and farmers market presence—I was responsible for designing, implementing, and maintaining the organization’s technology infrastructure.

Much of what I built during my time as IT Coordinator, I first had to learn. I came in knowing what a resilient system needed to look like—but not always how to implement each piece. I learned one technology at a time, introducing changes incrementally while keeping critical systems online. User training was a central part of the process. Whether migrating users from Windows to Linux, introducing LibreOffice, or eventually moving services to Google Workspace, I made user adoption as much a priority as the technical implementation itself.

Looking back, nearly everything I learned about technology during the first three decades of my career was self-directed. Whether I was configuring DOS memory managers, building networks, administering Linux systems, participating in online communities, or implementing infrastructure in professional environments, the process was usually the same: identify a problem, research it, experiment, and keep learning until it worked.

It wasn’t until my mid-forties that I entered a formal classroom environment to study cybersecurity and networking. By then, I had already spent most of my life learning technology by doing. Today, I view my cybersecurity education not as the beginning of a new journey, but as the continuation of one that started decades ago with a shortwave radio, a BASIC prompt, and a desire to understand how things work.