About Us


Admired Quotes

  1. * the quieter you become the more you are able to hear *
  2. * comparing yourself to others will only bring unhappiness *

I am an avid gardener, network engineer, systems administrator, and started an internet company in 1995 which I still maintain. I lived overseas for 20 years, and when I returned to US I worked at a farm for several years as a manager, project manager, hydroponics, and propagation. In 2020 I left the farm job and have been working in IT and networking ever since. I am also breeding drought tolerant varieties of heirloom corn and doing experiments dryland farming corn, sorghum, wheat, and other vegetables.

As of July 2025 I am doing a second version of Email From Scratch on Debian (using only packages), and once complete will do the Email From Scratch on FreeBSD v2 (this time using only packages for ease of maintenance).

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

Hardware

  1. Dell R620 (32 threads) - Debian
  2. Dell R720 (40 threads) - FreeBSD
  3. Any generic old PC that runs Windows
  4. OrangePi 5b (8 core 8GB RAM) - Armbian
  5. Macbook (2013) - Catalina

Display Managers

  1. lightdm
  2. xdm
  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. Edge
  3. Chromium
  4. Chrome
  5. Nightly (this works better for tor than Brave)
  6. Brave (nice browser bug buggy with tor)
  7. Edge
  8. Tor Browser

Search Engines

  1. DuckDuckGo
  2. Google
  3. Brave

Web Servers

  1. Apache (used since 1995)
  2. Nginx (recently installed on bhyve vm and works well as a dropin for Apache)

Mail Servers

  1. Debian - from scratch with RoundCube
  2. FreeBSD - from scratch with RoundCube
  3. 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)