About Me

So …..

a bit about me. I live here in North Carolina. My heritage is Jamaican and I was born in Luton, England. I grew up in Brooklyn and I am a diehard New York Yankees fan. Since I was a Boy Scout, my favorite football team is the Philadelphia Eagles. Yup, go figure…

I attended the University of Maryland, University College at Spangdahlem AFB in Germany while serving in the military and my major is in Computer Science with a minors in Mathematics. My career in Information Technology has now spanned over thirty years from systems administration to network administration to storage administration and cloud architecture. Now…all about cloud computing…storage, network and compute virtualization. I’m facinated with platforms at scale, serverless architectures and container orchestration. At my core, a love for electronics and complex hardware.  But my focus and interest is still around storage. The challenges of storing and moving information have always been fascinating to me.

Over the years, I’ve worked mainly in IT support from Glaxo, to IBM, with MCI being my longest tenure. I spent some time at Netapp doing Block QA and then on to EMC as a presales Advisory Technical Consultant. I’m currently a manager and leader of a fantastic team of systems engineers dedicated to the service provider community at EMC Corporation. They actually make my job easy.

I’ve tinkered with various operating systems over the years. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 back in 1982. Funny, as first real resume was done on a Commodore 128D with a Star dot matrix printer using GEOWrite. From there, Windows like everyone else. OS/2 for a while, got on the Warp kick and used it as my primary desktop. Next was Linux. The first install was the Yggdrasil distro and done on a friends computer, wiping out his Windows partition…oops. Then ran SuSE and Fedora as my primary desktop for a few years but I’m now a 100% Mac user/fanboy/whatever. I now mainly use Linux for my home infrastructure and tinkering, which sits on top of ESX here at home. I spend most of my technical time now focused around storage, but not traditional storage. I’m interested in scalable file systems and tinkering with administering open source Ceph.

You can view my professional resume in PDF format here.

I do have a few non-tech hobbies. Sailing is my first love. Music is my second, both playing and listening and I’m also an audiophile (go figure). I love mainly progressive rock, jazz and fusion so you can imagine the drummers I like.

But more than my hobby is my passion and a way of life, which would be sailing and cruising. I re-caught the bug some years ago and it’s been full steam ahead since. I have a Beneteau 361 named Hemispheres, kept at River Dunes near Oriental, NC. I love casting off and letting the wind dictate where I go. It’s a great way to wind down and relax. It’s also exhilarating on a good, windy day. I love the sailing community, the approach to life, the simplicity and the exploration. My longest sail to date is from Noank, CT to our home port of Oriental, NC., when we brought Hemispheres home. I’m planning an east coast trip to Maine and back in a couple years along with a trip to the Bahamas for a winter season.