rtstarliper
About me....don't forget, you asked for it! ![]()
I have been interested in and involved with computer technologies since my first Commodore 64 in the early 80's. Finally got an IT job just in time to deal with Y2K - and spent 23-1/2 years in that role - all with the same company. Still employed there, but no longer in IT. I am now in the IT Internal Audit team, which is under the finance organization. That team loved my move, some of my former colleagues in the IT org were not fond of it - and both for the same reason. As one of my friends on the IT side put it "You know too much. You know how we do things. You know where the bodies are buried! We need one of those Men-In-Black flashy thing to use on you before you go."
Technology is rather pervasive in my world. I have a network setup at home that does not really use consumer level gear. Prosumer would be best (although I have seen a number of commercial operations using Ubiquiti Unifi gear). I have that mixed with Cisco at home. I also support a high school FM broadcast station - 5500 watts of power make us one of the largest high school stations in the US, not that there are a lot of high schools that have an actual over the air operating radio station. As with most things, I have seen the station go from all analog signals to mostly digital signals. From getting news on a UPI teletype machine to getting it from a website (and downloading a pre-recorded newscast to air from the site!). Although we are 'owned and operated' by the school district, we effectively run ourselves independently. That includes the networks in the station (although I do now have a firewalled connection to the district network, we are going to move our main phone number to the district's SIP line).
Besides the engineering work for the radio station, I am also a woodworker, mainly doing wood turning. I attend a number of craft shows as a vendor with my father-in-law over the summer months. I have my wood, he has his handcrafted sterling silver jewelry. I am also the president of our local chapter of the American Association of Woodturners (AAW), and a founding member of the recently-formed AAW Technology Committee, which grew out of a grass-roots effort started by some local clubs to help clubs with online and hybrid meetings through the pandemic. The effort took off and went national pretty quickly, so several of us formed a working group and drew up a document requesting official status as an AAW committee.
For the radio station and the woodturners club, I am providing web site management (hosting got too much, I had to ask them to take it over). I also assist the local chapter of the Society of Broadcast Engineers with their website. I might add all of these use Let's Encrypt SSL certs.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk! ![]()
(PS - I also am rather fluent in both snark and sarcasm, in case you have not figured that out yet!)