For those of you who have happened upon this blog and have no clue who I am, allow me to give you a brief introduction.

If you google my name, you’ll see that I discovered the usefulness of posting to newsgroups around 1999. It was soon after that when I became mildly paranoid about the Internet and tried to limit my exposure. This paranoia inevitably led to my current career in the security industry. Nevertheless, I have had to crawl out of my shell occasionally, snippets of which you will find online.

I began this blog in back in January 2002 hoping it would be a useful place to share useful tech accomplishments as well as keep my family posted on my latest perusings in life as I don’t always tend to be the most communicative son. I decided to code the site myself in a valiant effort to learn about the up and coming popularity of PHP and MySQL-based web apps, thus my site used to lack some of the flashy features of other blogs such as RSS and a good archives view. As I enjoy spending my time outside more often than not these days, I took the plunge and moved to a real blog - WordPress. It has made my life much easier.

So who am I? Just another geek with a passion for understanding how systems work and using that knowledge to build them…and then consequently break them. I love a good challenge and that’s the best way to get me to achieve at my peak (with both positive and negative benefits). I love technology in general as is evidenced by my environment at home currently consisting of OS X, Windows, Linux, and Solaris. I also enjoy coding small utility programs as I enjoy building something people can use to make their lives easier and it also helps me to better understand a given system.

Beyond the technical aspects, I like to enjoy life. I try not to stress myself with the little stuff, and try to enjoy what life hands me, as you may have noticed from some of my previous posts if you’ve been around for a while. As part of that, I now live in the Pacific Northwest where I enjoy the beautiful summers out on the hiking trails hiking up large mountains and the gray and dreary winters snowboarding down those same large mountains.

For now, take care, and enjoy the ramblings of my existence!  If you would like to contact me, feel free to send me an email to webdamon[at_]dcortesi.com