I used to work in the Hybrid Micro Devices lab at Litton Industries building radar warning systems for military aircraft. After Litton merged with Northrop Grumman, we all got laid off and a number of us went back to school.

In 1998, I started working on a computer science (CS) degree at Rogue Community College (RCC), since The Job Council told those of us at Litton that a CS degree would land us a high-paying job someday.

My first exposure to Linux was in 1999 when I was a CS student at RCC. None of my CS instructors were teaching any Linux classes. They were all focused on Microsoft Windows. My best friend at the time, who was running the chemistry/biology/physics lab at RCC as well as teaching anatomy and physiology to nursing students, bought a copy of Red Hat Linux 5. I went over to his house one day to play Electronic Arts’ Need for Speed, and he showed me this new Red Hat Linux operating system (OS) I had never heard of before.

I had just built a new computer using an AMD 450 MHz CPU I overclocked to 500 MHz using a Peltier cooling device. At the time, I was running Windows NT 4.0 Workstation (that I got for free when I purchased Visual Basic from the RCC bookstore) and Windows 98.

When I installed Red Hat Linux 5, it overlapped my existing Windows 98 hard drive partition, and I lost all my data. (At the time, I didn’t know anything about file/partition recovery using something like PhotoRec and TestDisk. It wasn’t until years later that I became an expert in data backup/recovery.) This wasn’t a good first impression of Linux.

Shortly thereafter, one of my CS instructors took us on a field trip to Musician’s Friend in Medford, Oregon USA and showed us their impressive servers running Red Hat Linux 5. I was very impressed with their Linux sysadmins. That left a lasting impression on me.

Years later in 2002, I went to work for a company that wanted me to replace their Windows server and workstations with Linux. (At the time, I had taken some time off from school at Southern Oregon University to give myself a break from my difficult computer science degree: I was working on a bachelor of science degree in computer programming, and then years later I changed my major to computer security.) I started teaching myself Red Hat Linux 9. After Red Hat discontinued version 9, I started learning Fedora Core 1. Shortly after the Fedora Project released its first stable OS, a public library was generous enough to release the binary version of White Box Enterprise Linux based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 3 source code, and I soon incorporated this OS into the three computer networks I was managing at the time running three primary and three backup domain controllers. I didn’t know anything about Bourne-Again SHell (Bash) at the time, but soon I taught myself Bash shell scripting to automate the installation and configuration of RHEL.

Since 2003, I have worked extensively with RHEL (starting with two RHEL variants: White Box Enterprise Linux and CentOS), Fedora (starting with the first release of Core 1), Mandrake (starting with the first Beta release of Mandrake Multi-Network Firewall)/Mandriva/Mageia (starting with the first release of this OS), openSUSE/SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (starting with the first release of this OS), Debian, and Ubuntu OSs. Ubuntu Linux LTS is my preferred OS of choice, since its extensive software repositories, long-term support for security updates, military-grade security, and overall sophistication make this a truly appealing, enterprise-class OS that is enjoyable to work with.

These days, my primary focus is health-care research and development (primarily neurocognitive functioning and how to resolve/reverse neurological problems), lobbying legislature for health-care reform (specifically revamping Oregon Health Authority, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and World Health Organization policies to improve health-care services for our citizens), and teaching people about vocational rehabilitation. I came up with a simple, rough-draft website, televocela.org, that someday I hope to have the time to further the development of to create an advanced educational platform for Voc Rehab. My motto is “knowledge is power.” I plan on devoting the rest of my life to health-care research and development (with an emphasis on substance abuse treatment/recovery) and teaching people about how to achieve happiness and success regardless of what health problems they suffer from (e.g., diminished neurocognitive functioning, chronic nerve pain, etc.).