Hello, from Dave Knight in SWVA

[diemkae]

At the risk of writing far more than anyone really wants to know about me, here goes:

At my age (pretty damn old) I've been a few places, and done a bunch of different things, including a basement chem lab starting in 7th grade, with lots of really cool stuff obtained over the years as free manufacturers' samples (many that would bring in the DHS swat teams these days), lots of free time and books ... books so good that I could teach myself enough chemistry to score 750 (800 max) on the College Board chemistry achievement test, before taking high school chemistry.

Apart from my focus on "scientific stuff", I guess I was pretty normal for the times - made some great fireworks, was the staff photographer for the local paper and a couple high school year books (did all my own darkroom work), sang bass in a capella chorus, went to Allstate twice, got the Bausch & Lomb chemistry award at graduation, went to college for a BS in chemistry. On my first job (lab assistant), I was seduced by the darkside (computers), and promptly abandoned what was sure to be a great career in chemistry for what turned out the be a fantastic career in systems programming. From IBM, CDC and Univac "big iron", commercial time-sharing and DEC PDP-11 networking in the 60s & 70s, to Motorola 68K desktops with Z80 peripheral boards to run Bunker-Ramo bank terminals and to simulate IBM 3274 & Univac UTS terminal controllers in the 80s, to Sun workstations, SPARC stations, and Unix PCs in the 80s & 90s, into the 21st century with Linux PCs, PIC and AVR single-chip microprocessors doing process control, monitoring & data acquisition; it has been, and continues to be, a great ride!

Somewhere in there, (c. 1983?) I even had a "CoCo", (Radio Shack Color Computer, Motorola MC6809E, 1 MHz cpu) running OS-9, with a C compiler, on 3 single-sided, single-density floppy disks. Definitely a learning experience: I had to write my own bit-bang serial driver to run a 300 baud modem, because the CoCo didn't have a UART!

No, I "don't do windows" (like Mr Belvedere), except sometimes in a virtual machine under Linux.

Why work when you can get paid to have fun?

Now, I'm finally getting back to my "roots", rebuilding my chem lab, learning electronics (after studiously avoiding anything to do with "hardware" for all these years), and still having fun with computers.

I'm somewhat "invested" in self-sufficiency & relative independence from public utilities & services, though I don't consider myself to be a "prepper". Mostly, I just like to do things for myself, partly because it's really hard to get good help these days!

In summary, some consider me to be a subject matter expert (SME) in: operating system architectures, systems programming, Unix/Linux system and network administration, software development environments, software revision control and release management, bind/DNS admin, webmaster/HTML/cgi, client/server applications, shell (Bourne, Korn, BASH) scripting, AWK, PERL, C/C++, Makefiles, SQL, beekeeping, firearms training, subsistence orchard, garden & small-scale farming, sourdough bread & baking, and gourmet cooking (esp. Chinese & Japanese).

Yet there is so much more still to learn... and the fun continues!

[Doug Coulter]

Glad you finally got going here, Dave. For those who didn't know, Dave is a good friend, an in fact is the guy in the middle on our home page picture.
His solar/beekeeping/chicken/orchard/garden stuff leaves me in awe - and he's pulling it off in a town, not in the boonies. I guess it's because he's such a nice guy that no one complains.

[solar_dave]

Welcome Dave

Sure interested in hearing more of your exploits!