POOF! Zaphod has appeared!

I probably should have read it through some of the other introductions here before introducing myself. Just to have a fair idea about what people tend to put here.

Well, anyway, I’m Joe. I’m one year shy of the half-century mark. The majority of my life, even before I started my career, I was, am, and always will be a computer geek. While my newest systems may be an AMD Ryzen 7, and Intel i7, my oldest systems have processors like the 6502 and 6809, and even an 8080 machine or two. My first “real” computer was the Timex Sinclair 1000 (US Version of the ZX81). Most of my friends had C64’s, Atari 400/800 systems, or Apple II’s.

Many visits to the library, working on the fraction of the internet that existed then, armed with a teletype machine, and using wonderful tools like Archie, Veronica, and Gopher, I crawled the web like a spider... oh wait, there was no “Web” at that time. But there was a network, on the verge of the explosion of consumer use, to the appliances we have now. Plus I could print a 5-foot long text image of the Enterprise. The library didn’t care for that too much. But I found many nuggets of knowledge, wether a very early iteration of the Anarchist’s cook-book, phreaking instructions showing how to make various boxes (Red/Blue/Black, etc). I absorbed the information like a sponge. While movies like WarGames became popular, many people became hackers because they “saw” a war-dialer in a movie, I filed away that information to prevent a scenario like WarGames. While I didn’t know it then, collecting all that various information would lead me to my career as a network security engineer. So a couple dozen years before 2FA (Two-Factor Authentication) went mainstream, one of my earliest projects in securing a corporate network, in which connectivity was through 2400-9600 baud modems, I had configured the network of a local bread bakery with a combination of dial-back and crypto-token based authentication. The token provided the one-time passwords, and the dial-back ensures that the network was accessed from authorized users phone numbers. This is when a lot of the executives were using PCAnywhere, without a password.

Many of my jobs through the years were System Administrator positions, but I always attempted to tighten security on the networks as well.

I worked either for companies, or as a contractor until 2012, when I ended up disabled, my back resembles a train-wreck, with 8 herniated discs, as well as a compression fracture. Plus for several years following becoming disabled, I suffered from severe PTSD as well.

I hurt all the time, chronic pain is not much fun, and with the so-called opioid ‘epidemic’ it was a difficult journey to find a doctor that treats me like a person who needs help as opposed to an addict wondering where his next hit was coming from.

Besides computers, I also enjoy collecting and repairing vintage video game consoles, watching anime, and spending time with my kids.

I would have included photos, but it doesn’t seem to like to accept the photos using a mobile web browser.

Joe