I work at a university in a pretty unique department. We run Solaris and Sun's SamFS with two giant tape robots and 8 Petabytes on disk and tape. We also have a very high volume videotape digitization project which also has robots. Those robots feed video cassettes into video digitization players. The videos are served up on Internet2 only, because of the high bandwidth required.

For several years, until recently, I worked in information security. I once had a job hacking corporate networks. Hacking is not my thing otherwise, but I do love going to DefCon most years. I once had a job building Internet PoPs in Latin America. Before all that I was a professional protographer. I learn all the IT stuff on the job and at home in my lab with lots and lots of reading. If it wasn't for O'reilly books I'd probably still be reading RFCs (ugh!).

My lab at home is a 7 foot Chatsworth rack with a couple of Sun Sparc boxes, router/firewall/wifi device with EVDO failover, DSL modem, printer, hub, etc. (no picture yet). I have various monitors and keybords. I use a KVM for testing and screwing around with other Linux/Windows/whatever boxes.

In the early days of my lab the rack was full of old Cisco 25xx series routers and even some old CSU/DSUs with crossover cables and hubs/switches in various topologies as needed. For a while there was a even a pair of modems hooked up to separate phone lines for testing dial-on-demand-routing for one of the Cisco certifications I was studying for at the time. I also worked with firewalls like IP Chains, IP Tables, Cisco's Pix and another vendor that I won't mention because I find it odious. Later I got into Linux, FreeBSD Unix, and most recently, Solaris Unix. Over the years I've played around with various Open Source software and OSes. Occasionally I get into something kind of exotic for a little bit such as the strange Layer 2 protocol that came with Microsoft Vista when it first came out a couple of years ago: LLDP. Learning how something works by messing around with it in a lab environment can be really fascinating...if you can find the time.

I really like text-to-speech programs. I use them with cron jobs on my various Unix and Mac computers to remind me of all kinds of stuff. I think the best is from Cepstral. But there is a more technically oriented one from Scotland called Festival.

I also do shell scripting and have enjoyed a bit of Perl programming, which is a lot more complex and difficult (for me). I've done just enough C to have understood pointers for a few weeks a few years ago. C is awesome, as long as I'm not the one doing the coding.

In the last couple of years I've also gotten into ham radio. I'm on VHF/UHF, which is where beginners have to start. But I want to get onto so-called HF, also known as shortwave. I can't yet feel comfortable spending the money on an HF transmitter, but I have put a lot of time into learning the basics of morse code, also known as CW.

These days I seem to be drawn more and more to technical writing. I really enjoy explaining (either in person or in writing) technology to people who are either not so technical or who do not yet know the subject matter.