About Us

I am an avid gardener, network engineer, systems administrator, and have had maintained my own website since 1995. We live in north central washington zone 6a in the rain shadow of the Cascades and my 17 year old son helps with farm tasks when he is not creating content on YouTube.

I initially learned about plants and gardening from my parents, worked in a greenhouse when I was 19, and because of my interest in plants majored in biological science at UCSD. I have an advanced degree in Biochemistry from University of Washington and started an internet company in 1995 which I still maintain. While I was overseas for 20 years, I started a vanilla orchid plantation and as a hobby kept 100's of orchid species and hybrids. We also started a dairy and supermarket supply business producing goat milk and goat cheese, briefly partnered with a local producer to make rice wine, and later changed to bacon, ham and sausages (over 200lbs of bacon a week). When we returned to US in 2017 I was employed at a farm for several years as a manager, project management, hydroponics, maintaining plant material, and doing 1000's of cuttings annually. In 2020 I switched back to IT and networking as my main occupation and am currently doing experiments dryland farming corn, sorghum, and wheat.

Current and Future Projects

  1. Experiments growing drought tolerant corn, sorghum, and 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. Debian
  2. FreeBSD
  3. Armbian
  4. CentOS
  5. Ubuntu
  6. Windows
  7. Windows Server for domain services
  8. Android User - Samsung Phone

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. Nightly (this works better for tor than Brave)
  3. Brave (nice browser bug buggy with tor)
  4. Edge
  5. 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 as a dropin for Apache)

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 *