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General:
The name 'Ztuff' was adopted many years ago as a name for the directory to stick miscellaneous things. When I spent a few moments (maybe it was seconds) thinking about a weblog name in January of 2002, Ztuff just felt like an appropriate name to use for my desire to post haphazard links, documents, stories and rants.
I've used other variants on the generic term 'stuff' over the years, but this felt right to me at the time. Folks who've known me for a long time know about the Z variant directories; I've gotten better, slightly.
It's important to understand that Ztuff is not focused on anything in particular. While I've been thinking about creating blogs targeted to some specific issues, Ztuff has become a place to talk about wildly different topics; from family to politics (and on rare occasions, even work). I once said (somewhere, I need to find it) that Ztuff should be a record that will help my children know me better as they grow older. I still believe that, even if the whole world has to know in the process. I had the slogan for a bit "whatever falls out of my brain". Perhaps that ought to be "whatever falls out of my brain and hits the keyboard". Seems to leave audio blogging out, at least for now.
The caricature here was created by my friend Stu (a talented cartoonist with no clue how good he is) nearly ten years ago. It remains oddly accurate (the glasses got smaller, my head became more bare) and yet vague enough to post. I use it in AIM, why not here.
So, who am I? Father of three boys, husband (long term) of a wonderful woman. A history buff on occasion (much less these days than twenty years ago), avid reader and all around technology fan (geek). I was also once a pretty good B&W photographer (it's all in the chemicals) and a decent surfer (east coast style). About eleven years ago I started bowling and still do it, although my peak has come and gone.
I was an early EarthLink employee, where I was tasked with creating and running the Mac client software group by a friend from my days at Symantec, Brian Yoder. Those early days were wild and wooly, but we had a lot of fun bringing order to the chaos and creating a functional (if mostly boring) base of functionality.
During my time in the Mac group (as Architect and Senior Manager — perhaps not the best combination, but that was how we did things in those days), the most important event was being noticed by Steve Jobs (he liked a concept we were using, not exactly how we used it) which led to the EarthLink positioning on the original iMac and helped forge the long term relationship between EarthLink and Apple. By early 2000, I was bored and my people were sick of me as a manager. After wearing many hats during the early days it was time to find a new one (one without the word manager anywhere near it).
I'd done a lot of tinkering over the previous couple of years and knew our systems pretty well from an end to end perspective which led to my moving to our System Software department as the architect for authentication and provisioning. These days I'm the chief architect for our core infrastructure department (our world just keeps getting bigger). It's an interesting (if often unappreciated) job, but someone has to do it. As the glue between the applications which modify various customer settings and the services our customers interact with, we stay pretty busy.
Some day perhaps I'll need to write up something about the insane world we lived in for about 15 months during 2002 and early 2003 while we were staggering through the final stages of EarthLink and Mindspring merger. Someone once described it as changing all the flight control surfaces of a plane in mid-flight and it sure felt like it at times.
Anyway, that's a glimpse... and a whole lot more than used to be here.
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The bits scribbled here are my own and don’t necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of my employer, EarthLink. C'est la vie!
