About

Hi. My name is Thomas.

I began life as a small child (as most of us did) and found myself drawn to music at some point later in life. I got a degree in trombone performance, which was fun and rewarding, but it didn’t quite work out in terms of amounting to a career. After graduating from college I worked as a residential painter, which was also fun, but the risks didn’t necessarily outweigh the rewards, so I explored other possibilities.

After exploring life as a painter, I began working in retail tech support. Initially, it was an opportunity born of convenience and it paid well enough (marginally more than painting, at least). It certainly wasn’t glamorous, but it opened my eyes to the possibility of working with computers professionally. Having become aware of such a thing, I realized how incredibly broad the possibilities were. I didn’t really know where to go with it other than what I was already doing: fixing broken laptops and phones.

At some point I started fooling around with Linux as a desktop, installing whatever distributions were touted as “difficult.” I installed Arch Linux several times, troubleshooting issues with drivers, configurations, and so forth. I then felt ready to graduate to Gentoo and actually felt accomplished when I got it working.

At some point I decided it would be a good idea to get a 2U server and began to experiment with running a home lab. I didn’t necessarily have a plan for it at first, but I came across a post on reddit that served as a great jumping-off point. I initially intended this blog to chronicle what I did as I went through each step and made it through several before succumbing to my deficient attention span.

In the process of kludging along, however, I realized that I had at least found myself on some vague path through a dense forest of possibilities. I discovered that I enjoyed three things:

How computer systems work together to provide consumable services.
Writing scripts and small programs in a variety of languages.
Open source software and the communities that surround them.

So for now, that’s what I’ll write about.

My earlier posts are not particularly good, but I’ll keep them around to hopefully demonstrate some positive progress and for the sake of perpetuity.