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About Me

Hey, here's some information about me.

Personal

My name is Mike. Rather than tell you my age and have the information go out of date, I'll tell you I was born in 1980. That way the information is always correct.

I grew up in Prince George, but moved to Quesnel in 2004. I like the small-town atmosphere.

After I quit smoking in 2001, I put on some weight. More than I liked. Now I'm in the process of getting rid of it. I've taken to lifting weight in a gym, but I prefer to burn energy on the bicycle in the summer, or cross-country skis in the winter. I hope some day soon to get back in the kind of shape I was in before I quit smoking (that sounds really odd, but it's true. I was in better shape when I smoked than I am now.)

In case you haven't figured it out already, I'm into computers. A lot. I'm a geek, and proud of it. Aside from that, I like to do home improvement stuff, since I have a home to do improvements on, and I want someday to get a project car in my garage I can pull wrenches on.

Education

I took a year off after high school and worked in a computer repair shop. Basic stuff. Defrag this Windows machine. Take the viruses off this one. Then I went to college for a couple years. In the first year, I learned things like how semiconductors were made, how inductors and capacitors worked, how to program microcontrollers and build power supplies, and why I learned all the calculus in school.

Second year was all the good stuff. We did NT administration, NetWare administration, monitors (lotsa sparks and smoke,) and printers. We even had a data communication course, so we knew how modems and such worked. During this time, I'd set up a machine running Linux that functioned as a server to house patch downloads for our LAN parties.

Career

After college, I went to work for a local company as a junior admin. I did some basic computer repair, and got into Linux in earnest. I was introduced to Debian, and began learning PHP and MySQL. Before leaving that company, I'd written a little database app that catalogued their products and could produce various fancy reports and brochures.

From there, I spent a little bit of time at a company doing basic computer droll again, with a little Linux work on the side. We sold Linux-based file servers to our clients, and it was my job to maintain them. Lots of on-site work. I was overjoyed when one of my old college buddies called me up and asked if I wanted to work for the School District in Quesnel.

When I started at the School District, we were entirely a NetWare shop. I was hired on because I knew enough to build and maintain NetWare servers, and things worked OK for a while. Then someone showed me the monitoring machine. It was a RedHat box running Nagios. I replaced it with a Debian box, and after a few transplants to different hardware, it's still running today.

After that success, I went on to develop our backup system, and then we started migrating our NetWare servers over to Linux and Samba.