Technology professional by day, grad student by night. Hello steemit.

Hi, I’m Steve.

I have been on Steemit for about three weeks now, and I’ve put up a few quick posts, but I figured it’s finally about time for me to take some time and write a formal introduction.  Forgive me if this sounds too much like a resume, but if I’m going to write honestly about who I am, the lion’s share really does have to be about my professional and educational background.  When I was young, I was fortunate to launch into a career in the technology field, an area about which I have always been passionate.  So, I can’t really describe myself without talking about my work and school activities.  I’ll divide my introduction into four sections: education, professional, personal interests, and some thoughts about steem and steemit.  So here we go…

Education

After high school, I completed a bachelor’s degree in mathematics during the late 1980s and beginning of the ‘90s.  I was out of school for a decade after that, until I returned at night time in 2001 to complete a masters degree in Computer Science.  My masters thesis covered the way that the base of representation affects storage efficiency for data that is stored with fixed length encoding, and it led to a conference publication and three patents.  A few years off again after that, and I have been pursuing an online PhD in Information Technology for about 7 years (yes, the school is online, but it is accredited ; -).  I passed qualifying exams and began my dissertation in the area of technical debt last year, and I hope to finish it next year.

I can’t say whether they’re original, but the coolest things that I have found, independently are:

1.) My masters thesis uncovered a way to make informed decisions about the base of representation of fixed length data in order to reduce the size of compressed, fixed length encoded data by up to 10% over compression alone.

2.) Just for fun, I devised these algorithms for converting integers between bases by using the offset between bases (i.e. base 10 is base [8, offset by 2]) and for converting between bases when one is a multiple of the other (i.e. base 16 is base [8 times 2]).  Both algorithms made use of matrix multiplication, but the especially interesting part was that the matrices I found to convert between bases by offset made use of Pascal’s Triangle or it’s exponential powers in a particular orientation.

Two sad things about item 2.), though: (i) the java is so old it doesn’t work in a browser any more, and I’m not going to make time to bring it up to date any time soon; and (ii) it’s hosted by CCIL, a non-profit that was founded by ESR, and is now on the eve of shutting down – I presume due to lack of funding.  So click fast ‘cause those algorithms probably won’t be on the web for long.  It will be a sad day for technology historians when ESR's project comes to an end.

Professional

I landed my first job in technology working in main frame computer operations back in the eighties (you might be a technology-dinosaur if you remember green-bar paper, card punches, and teletypes with scrolling paper and modems that used rubber cups to hold the phone in place).  After that, over the course of several years, I did a variety of things including programming, X.25, Frame Relay, and eventually TCP/IP networking, and finally UNIX systems administration.  It’s hard to believe that I’ve been working full time, professionally in UNIX administration, engineering, and architecture for somewhere around 23 years now!  During that time, I have also gone through time periods writing code, and managing firewalls, web servers & high availability clusters.

Personal

Technology

My first computer exposure came as a young child, playing “adventure” (colossal cave) on a relative’s teletype connected by phone to a corporate main frame.  This is probably what triggered my own life-long interest in technology (reminds me of this audio.  If you want your daughter to code, get her gaming!)  My first programming experience was using BASIC on a Radio Shack TRS-80 in eighth grade.  Boy how I loved using peek and poke to make dots, lines, shapes, and sin waves appear and disappear on that black and white screen!  In ninth grade, the geometry teacher got a color computer.  Living large!  At home, a few years later, my Commodore-64 lasted through most of college.

Athletics

Yes, I’m a geek, and I can’t stand watching sports, unless it’s in person and someone I know is playing (or if it’s Ronda Rousey in the UFC), but I have participated in athletics throughout much of my life.  In elementary school and high school, I swam.  In college, I wrestled.  After college I was a gym rat into my early thirties.  (Routers and switches that I managed for one of my employers had names like “Arnold”, “Franco”, “Lou”, “Dorian”, and “Ronnie.”)  Through my thirties and most of my forties, it’s been: “Another year, another belt size.”  But in the last few years, my son and I started practicing Shotokan karate together, both progressing to the rank of brown belt, and then we’ve been hot and cold getting back to the gym.

Family

I’ve been happily married for 16 years to a woman who I first met in third grade, and we have a son who’s an incoming high school freshman.  He has posted some of his musical compositions on steemit, here.  As you may have guessed, I’m the one who introduced him to steemit.  My wife and I are both very proud of how hard he works at his musical endeavors, and he certainly did not inherit that musical talent from me (you’ll have to trust me on this...).

Hobbies

As noted, I’m trying to reestablish the gym-rat habit with only marginal success, and I’d like to get back to karate classes too.  But, who knows if it will happen.  Maybe not until after I finish my dissertation.  

The only other hobby I’ve had recently is learning about cryptocurrencies.  I can still remember the first time I compiled NCSA Mosaic and used it to browse the Internet.  Soon after, I installed WAIS, and boom! the world had changed.  Cryptocurrency sort-of feels like we’re on the cusp of that same place again.  So, I’ve been playing with mining altcoins for about a year and learning what I can in the spare minutes I can find.

steemit: Why am I here?

I like steemit for two primary reasons.  First is the reward your users model, and second is a technology fascination with the innovative STEEM/SP/SBD cryptocurrency structure.

To elaborate on rewarding the users, when tsu.co launched in 2014, I was immediately convinced that the future of social media must eventually involve paying content creators for their content.  I love (LOVE!) Jaron Lanier’s concept that technology companies should look for ways to make their customers wealthy.

I don’t know if it has a name, but I call it, “Lanier’s Principle” (clever, huh? ; -)  I see steemit as a step in that direction.

I’m aware of Zipf’s Law, and that the reality is that most of us will not get large sums of money over sustained periods of time, but I think that no matter how small the rewards, this model is more visionary and sustainable than the track & advertise funding model.  So for me, steemit is a small step into that future.  The reality is that start-ups usually fail, but I think steemit is on the right track, and even if steemit isn’t “the one,” then I’ll be there for whoever picks up the torch next.  (I like the brave browser for similar reasons.)

Lastly, I’m here as an educational experience for my son.  Some of the content is racy, and I’m not really thrilled about exposing a young teenager to it, but as a budding musician, I want him to start learning to see the Internet as an endless opportunity for entrepreneurship, and this is the perfect way to help him to start seeing some of the limitless opportunities.

In closing, I’m not sure how often I’ll be writing, but when I do, it will probably be on some of the following topics:

• Technical Debt
• Stakeholder Theory
• Qualitative Research (especially the Delphi method)
• Miscellaneous technology
• Other sciences
• Whatever I feel like

So there you go, steemit.  I’m pleased to meet you.

Find me on the web

• An archive of my first personal web site was The World of remlaPS is still atrophying away, one day at a time.
• Here I am in LinkedIn.
• And facebook.

Verification

About that picture…. Maybe later.  Not that I’m particularly opposed to pictures, but I’m just not the selfie type.  And honestly, the intense focus here on “identifying” people by pictures when they are posting with cryptographic keys really mystifies me.  If you really can’t sleep at night without some sort of out of band verification, “remlaps” probably has a google trail going back to before Google was even founded.  I’m pretty sure I started using it in ‘95 or ‘96.  And of course, there’s this and this.