One day I looked up sysadmin on urban dictionary. Below is my favorite definition:
The troll that looks over the computers at your school/library/local bestbuy. He has no real power and solely relies on smoke and mirrors to intimidate students. His magical powers include psychic remote viewing (through VNC desktop viewer), sending popup messages through winpopup, remote restart/shutdown, locking up your desktop, and playing god.
While this made me laugh a lot (I have met a few of these sysadmins). The definition that I hope more mirrors my work is this one:
Someone who makes what ever craptastic software package or networking configuration that the customer and/or development team wants actually work.
Going forward I hope to fill this page with some of the knowledge that I come across in my journey. I few interesting facts about me:
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I helped build a self-driving wheelchair in college. We competed in the IGVC competition with it. Here it is in action (wow, I look young in that video). Here is the paper we wrote about it.
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I currently work for the Boise State Computer Science Department (job title: IT Systems Engineer). I spend most of my time in Linux and some Windows on the side. I support a Linux lab (currently running CentOS 7) of 146 computers and several department servers.
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One of my favorite quotes is: "Never trust a bald barber." This comes from the movie Kuffs. A friend told it to me once and it stuck with me. I still have not seen the movie.
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I am a founder and current member of the Board of Directors for a charter school in Kuna, Idaho. The school focus on STEM education and project-based learning. I also helped design the website. It is not super great yet, but it is getting better.