I am commonly known by the moniker "gotwf" on the Internet.

I am a Unix/Linux systems person. I have both broad and deep experience with backend platform stuff and may be best described as a "Jack of All Trades, Master of None". ^[1]

During the early days of the 'Net I worked in small shops and local ISP’s. We all wore a number of hats. A brave new world that was evolving fast and those on the cutting edge today were playing catch up tomorrow. Exciting times.

Commercial vendor "Big Iron" proprietary Unix data center gigs, by contrast, were the antithesis of cutting edge rapid development. Turns out big corporate clients do not like surprises so stability and processes became the name of the game. Kicking it old skool, working with servers globally in days prior to cloud computing and mega acre data centers proved enlightening.

During prehistoric times I had some stuff on the web. The Internet grew up. I got involved with configuring and maintaining the new wave of various cool kids on the block RDBMS backed scripting and templating interfaced slick whiz bang thangs …​. a.k.a. "The LAMP Stack"™. Too busy to justify such fantastical feats of engineering for a personal site, coupled with the ever growing profusion of the blog sphere…​. Meh, why bother?

Still…​ from time to time…​ while waxing nostalgic about bygone days I’d ponder implementing something akin to the old static workflow using more modern tool sets. Hence, I’ve had an eye on static blog/site generators Surges) for some while. Early contenders that caught my radar and went on to become players included the usual suspects: Jekyll, Octopress, Hexo, Pelican, and later Nikola. Go got invented and not long after Hugo was among the leaders of the pack. Those who favor JAMtacks should explore Next.js and Gatsby. If you are interested in static site generators the above make a good round up for your short list.

Be all that as it may,this blog is utilizing Cryogen, a Clojure based generator supporting both Markdown and Asciidoc markup. I strongly prefer Asciidoc. I’m sure there are choices out there better suited for your needs. Indeed, investing concerted effort and time in exhaustive research and testing may well discover something better suited to my needs. But I have better things to do so Cryogen Web will suffice quite nice.

After many years of using vi/m, in more recent decades I’ve come to prefer Emacs. An interest in Lisp seems to be almost de’riguer consequence of such madness. Being an Emacs user, one may wonder why I don’t just use Org-mode for this blog? Good question…​

I’ve used a lot of Linux/Unix based XFree86 and Xorg window managers and desktop environments over the years. I have been using StumpWM, a static tiling window manager with very Emacs-esque keybindings, for the last several.

Operating systems of interest include various Illumos based OpenSolaris descendants such as OmniOS Community Edition and SmartOS. Teamcool makes good use of FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Once upon a time in the celebrated days of big iron, I was an HP Certified IT Professional HP-UX Systems Administrator. Yep, quite the impressive long winded title there fer' sure, fer' sure.

I have long been interested in server and network security from a "white hat" defender perspective. It is just a given for responsible admins putting servers providing various services out there on the 'Net. Nobody is perfect but we should all do our best to be good netizens, eh?

I have also done the DevOps Engineering thang. I like orchestrating talented teams that git' 'er done and git' 'er done well.

In even more recent times I am enjoying a smorgasbord of other groovy stuff!

Yippie yi yo kiyah!

I am a life long learner. I like playing with words. At times I am opinionated. We can agree, at least, that we disagree. Or not. Depending on perspective. I have a sense of humor. It can be wry, sarcastic, facetious, and probably a few other choice adjectives at any given moment in time. My writing may be peppered with "anachronistic one liners". May be not. I like understanding how things work. There’s a lot of stuff on the 'net that basically boils down to copy pasta. Terse shell code listings and "notes to self" pages may provide insight. Or not. How to discern? The old fashioned way. Work at it. If I am lucky I may end up being able to separate the chafe from the wheat. May be not. I often times share links pointing back to where I learned something. My alter ego insists on also throwing in a few Easter Eggs linking to whatever. Wherever. They tend be pretty random and/or snarky but hopefully keep things interesting. For some at least. Else why would I spend time writing this stuff?

If you are:

Please take heed that this site may not be your scene. May be. Peace.

The astute reader will note that we do not feature a comment system. Truth be told trying to maintain such would only present yet one more illusion. And certain disappointment. It would be erroneous to conclude, however, that we do not welcome discussion and healthy debate, but only that there are better channels to do so.

Can at various times be found in the lurking on Libre Chat on #nodebb, #stumpwm, #omnios and most recently…​ Well, one never knows…​ ;D

My Open PGP public key fingerprint is: 1B07 8822 D3D5 C5E5 1C42 A288 6D91 D387 D9C4 A6C0 and is available at keys.openpgp.org.