User:Bagheera

About me
I'm an IT geek in my mid 40's, with an education in Mechanical Engineering and English. Professionally, I am a specialist in Computer Security with a slant towards penetration testing. Now back with "A small hardware vendor in the Valley," as a Datacenter Engineer, after practicing my trade with "a moderately large Financial Institution" in the City by the Bay. My IT background goes back to the mainframe days, and I cut my teeth on such beasts as the DEC PDP11/70, Vaxx, and HP2000E.

My callsign, "Bagheera", was a gift of sorts from a close friend. The "why" of that gift will remain obscure in this context. I've been a sailor for 30 years, and owned boats from little 8' dinghies up through an old wood Ketch that's over 40 feet from bow sprit to overhanging mizzen. I've raced motorcycles and sidecars, and done a bit of Autocross and Rally driving as a navigator. Sailing to Motor Sports at opposite ends of the speed spectrum. My current rides are an Interceptor, a BMW R-Bike, a Subaru WRX, and the aforementioned sailboat - a rare Wells 34.

The household datacenter includes servers for Web, mail, IRC, and a couple of games, including NwN. I've been a tech writer along with the other IT work, and some of my technical manuals were in print for over 5 years. I've had a hand in the development of a number of commercially published RPGs, and have my own SciFi RPG in a long (loooooong) running playtest.

Contributions
I've decided to take a break from active editing, tagging, or other work except where I find obvious grammatical or typological errors. Too hard to keep people happy in other respects, and it was proving to be more frustrating than it was worth.

Articles
None yet, though I want to do a Bio for Gene Wells, a yacht designer born in Southern California who later moved to Kauai. Gene passed away a few years ago, and has the distinction of having a regatta named for him. And Jon Schulps, a ceramicist and knife maker from Northern California, who is well known and respected for his craft. Jon passed away on July 31, 2010.

Works in progress
I'm currently working on a major rewrite of the Causes of Accidents section of the Motorcycle Safety article.

The Mantra
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion It is by the Beans of Java that thought acquires speed the hands acquire shaking the shaking is a warning It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion

Experiments
Since there's a number of things I want to work on, I'm dropping in a sandbox to bash upon before adding serious changes to existing articles.

My personal Sandbox