About

I am an avid gardener, network engineer, systems administrator, and have had maintained my own website since 1995.

Short Biography

Learned about plants and gardening from my parents, worked in a greenhouse when I was 19, and because of interest in plants majored in biological science at UCSD. Got an advanced degree in Biochemistry at UW and started an internet company in 1995 which I still maintain. Lived overseas for 20 years and started a vanilla orchid plantation and had 100's of hobby orchid species. Started a supermarket supply business producting ham, sausages, and over 200lbs of bacon a week. Returned to US in 2017 and worked in a greenhouse for several years as a manager, project management, hydroponics, maintaining plant material, and doing 1000's of cuttings annually. Returned to computers as main occupation in 2020 and currently doing experiments dry land farming corn, sorghum, and wheat.

Current and Future Projects

  1. Experiments growing drought tolerant corn, sorghum, and now trying winter wheat.
  2. Expanding my fig tree collection and growing more in ground figs.
  3. This website (small screen navigation support is fixed, well the bottom bar still behaves strangely).
  4. Configuring site-to-site VPN to access a home network behind a T-Mobile Home Internet Router. I used an internal Microtik Router to initiate a connection to external FreeBSD OpenVPN server and this server can be connected from any location to reach the internal network (done need to write it up). While this works from anywhere but the downside is the traffic goes to the server before back to the T-Mobile Home Internet network. Another way to do this is just setup your office router as OpenVPN server provding a fixed IP, connect with FreeBSD or home router using OpenVPN and connect back through the VPN from the T-Mobile home network.
  5. Setting up tor proxy for privacy. This worked well so went on the dark web and was not impressed with what I saw there. I'll the proxy features but not interested in what the dark web has to offer.
  6. Setting up a FreeBSD or Debian VM as a Domain Controller, maybe not now.
  7. Cleaning up spelling errors on this site. There were alot of typos but no they weren't only typo's - apparently I still can't spell "their" -ibility -able -ible and a few other words especially things with "sc" and sometimes "ly" vs "ley".

Languages

  1. Perl
  2. PHP
  3. MySQL
  4. HTML
  5. CSS - a little
  6. Javascript - not usually
  7. Python - still learning
  8. C - if you really make me
  9. Java - I used to know some :)

Operating Systems

  1. FreeBSD
  2. Debian
  3. Armbian
  4. CentOS
  5. Ubuntu
  6. Windows
  7. Windows Server for domain services
  8. Android User - Samsung Phone

Hardware

  1. Dell R720 (40 threads) - FreeBSD
  2. Dell R620 (32 threads) - Debian
  3. OrangePi 5b (8 core 8GB RAM) - Armbian
  4. Any generic old PC that runs Windows

Display Managers

  1. xdm
  2. lightdm
  3. sddm

Desktops

  1. Xfce
  2. Windows
  3. Plasma

Hypervisors

  1. bhyve - FreeBSD
  2. kvm - Linux
  3. Hyper-V - Preferred if on Windows
  4. Virtual Box
  5. ESXi - switched back to bhyve because ESXi doesn't have a desktop.

Browsers

  1. Firefox
  2. Nightly (this works better for tor than Brave)
  3. Brave (nice browser bug buggy with tor)
  4. Edge

Search Engines

  1. DuckDuckGo

Web Servers

  1. Apache (used since 1995)
  2. Nginx (recently installed on bhyve vm and it's a for Apache and is fast)

Mail Servers

  1. Zimbra - self hosted

Routers

  1. Microtik
  2. Any *ix setup as a router.
  3. pfSense

Editors

  1. nano (clone of pico)
  2. emacs (for programming)
  3. Notepad (tried and true on Windows)
  4. vi (when needed)

Graphics

  1. Gimp
  2. XV
  3. xpaint
  4. inkscape

Ideas & Philsophy

  1. Be a life long learner and learn something new everyday.
  2. Site cookies are usually needed for functionality but popups, excessive advertising, and cross site tracking are ruining the internet. Information on the internet is no longer free.
  3. A picture is not worth 1000 words and literacy is on the decline. How-to videos have their use but it do not replace searchable text. Watching a 3 minute video for the 2 seconds on information which might be present is not as efficient as scanning a page of text for the information you want or using a search engine which has indexed the relevant information. Some howto videos are useful so each has their place.

Education

  1. BA - Biochemistry and Cell Biology
  2. PhDc. - Biochemistry (fermentation)

Admired Quotes

  1. * the quieter you become the more you are able to hear *

Still Working on YouTube Channel