About Bill

You found me!

For the last 25-ish (or so…) years I’ve been involved with technology in some form, mostly with the Internet, networking computers and other geeky things.  In 1994 I helped a friend start the first ISP in Snohomish County, that was a great deal of fun, but rather like strapping a rocket onto your back and lighting the fuse.

Linux was the hot new thing and a customer at a small engineering shop on the outskirts of Sultan loaned me his brand new Slackware 2.1 CD set. The only real problem with this was that it was before CD drives became inexpensive, so many of the first installations were done by loading the A and N sets (base & networking) via floppy disc. Once loaded and the network card was configured by re-setting jumpers to find an IRQ and I/O address that would work, the rest of the installation could be done at greater speed by downloading the remaining sets over the network. I had recently picked up four sticks of 1-Megabyte RAM for my 386 for a great price of $40 per stick, and I was off and running!  I’ve completely lost count of how many times I’ve installed it to date, I’m still a Slackware user and find no reason to change.  I find it takes just as long to learn how to use the latest GUI tools to configure and setup the box as it does to just configure manually.

Since then, I worked for another ISP for several years, ran a small consulting business, ran the IT department at a mega church and now I work for a software company in Kirkland (from home) as one of their Tier 2 support engineers.

Since mid 2015, I’ve been working hard on getting my small workshop completed and tooled up. One of the acquisitions was a wood lathe, and I am now hopelessly hooked on woodturning.