I was born in Kingston, Jamaica. I grew up there, went to school there, graduated from college, worked for 15+ years ... before meeting and marrying my soul mate and moving to the United States.
After high school, I wanted to go to law school but I did not do as well I could have in my high school examinations to make it in the Norman Manley Law School at the University of the West Indies. My second application went to the University of Technology (known as College of Arts, Science, and Technology in those days) to study Computer Science. Considering how much I love computer and technology, I think not getting into law school was probably for the best.
I failed a couple of my college courses and was lazy about getting them retaken in time to graduate. I went straight to work where I spent the next 8 or so years working with COBOL, Informix, and SCO Unix. In fact, I am quite proud of my first project being a COBOL payroll program on a IBM system 36. I tell the story of having to process the payroll for St. Mary Banana and driving out with their payroll on an 8-inch disk all the time. Even if it dates me, I am proud that my experiences have given me exposure to all sorts and types of technologies and environments. By the time I was moving to the United States, I have gained experience in Oracle and Informix and a few other technologies based in sectors such as government finance, mortgage processing, and wireless telecommunications.
I married into the US Military which meant jobs were going to be hard to find and keep due to the moving around every 2-4 years. After trying to get back into wireless telecommunications, and having to cut that short to move to Texas from Kentucky, I decided to look for remote jobs that would move with me wherever we went. And thus began my new journey.
My first remote job was with Paradise Publishers where I worked on a few different websites doing very basic tasks such as quality assurance when new features were being released, writing news posts and blogs, monitoring and moderating forums, operating the help desk when the regular help desk staff were out of office. And then I was made "Editor-in-chief" of the ebooks site that Paradise Publishers owned at the time. I did very little editing save for suggesting basic changes to manuscripts submitted to the site. My role was more of a librarian - ensuring quality and readability of ebook submissions, as well as coordinating with authors about their books and their plans for future submissions. Once in a while, I would do author write-ups for authors who were prolific and I was given the weekly newsletter to manage after a year or two.
After almost 5 years with Paradise Publishers, I was laid off. By this time, I had discovered a love of writing and stories. I went back to school for a Bachelor of Communication degree with a concentration in Intercultural Communication. As a part of the curriculum, I discovered the art of facilitative mediation and as a volunteer with the Dispute Resolution Center of Thurston County, Washington, I completed 40 hours of training, the entrance exam, and all my apprentice mediations. Unfortunately, another military move interfered with my official certification as an independent mediator.
It was while performing mediations that I realised I rather liked the idea of helping people through conflict and chaos and sought a path that would allow me to do so without needing to start from scratch at a new dispute resolution centre. After much thought and consultations with friends, family, and counselling professionals, I settled on a "Master of Social Work. And since we were headed to Germany (with the military), an online degree was going to be my best option. The only university that would cater to that requirement at the time was the University of Southern California. And I was ecstatic when they accepted me.
Even though my academic and professional path had strayed into the human services, I maintained my interest and expertise in technology. While working with Paradise Publishers, and with the help of a friend, I set up a home server and continue to work with Debian, Ubuntu, and several self-hosted applications. Not the least of which was a blog that had seen several iterations over the years - Movable Type, Mambo, and Wordpress.That home server has grown exponentially since then. And while it isn't enterprise level hardware just yet, it still runs my several projects quite well. In fact, this page was built and is hosted on that server. Written from scratch with HTML and CSS and hosted on a Debian server running NGINX and php-fpm.
I love taking photographs. I acquired a Nikon D3000 back when it was a brand new model and I still have it - in good working condition. Over the years, I have collected a few different lenses and a few other accessories to expand my composition options. I really like taking macro photographs and landscape scenes. I also take too many photos of my dogs, Draega and Casper, and random images of my surroundings. I especially like to take still-life images in black and white. I used to host my own photo gallery using an app I can no longer find online (I think it was called Gallery 2?), and am currently trying to recreate it using Piwigo. That project has taken a bit of back seat in favour of other things, not the least of which is some front end developer courses and certification.
I used to read fiction voraciously before my Masters program. My favourite author for many years was Stephen King. Since the Masters program, however, I find that my reading has diminished quite a bit in favour of documentaries, non-fiction, and video gaming. I was always a big gamer, but I still found time to read. So much so that it was more economical - financially and space-wise - to get a Kindle to read on instead of lugging around dozens of books wherever I went. Lately, I barely manage reading a book a month where I used to polish off 4 or 5 in a month. I've found that a surprising number of people have had the same experiences after doing an advanced degree. And it's more than a little comforting to know that I am not alone there.
After two transatlantic moves, I am burnt out on so many things. And I find an almost exquisite peace and satisfaction to sit around and experiment with self-hosted applications while I do contract work remotely. My current job is low-stress, low-demand but it uses up much of my technology and image processing skills. And I work at my own pace and on my own time. That said, I am itching to get back into coding as it has always proven to be highly rewarding and, as this website is intended to show, still quite a passion and a joy for me.
My homelab has grown to include self-hosted rss aggregator, a Nextcloud instance, a timekeeping and invoicing app for my current team of contractors, a NGINX proxy manager installation, an article archiver, a YOURLS installation, a Wordpress blog, this website, and mailinabox installation.
Finally, I am doing some course on Udemy.com to boost my front end development skills. At the moment, I am working on Front End Developer Bootcamp. I am actually having a lot more fun than I thought I would be. The only problem I am finding is that I stop the course to muck around in my Sandbox so I am lagging behind the projected end date for the course. My goal is to learn enough of this stuff to actually be marketable as a front end developer in the near future. Stay tuned to see how that works out for me.