User:Joeldbenson

FWIW, I have bachelor's degrees in chemical engineering and journalism and several decades of experience as a technical writer, mostly in the area of turbomachinery control. Due to circumstances mostly beyond my control, I have been only sporadically employed for the last several years and will probably have to at least semi-retire soon. I have decided that editing Wikepedia articles is one way I can keep my skills sharp and usefully employ my abundant free time. I do not consider myself an expert on most of the topics I will edit (other than turbomachinery control), but do fancy that I am quite good at researching, organizing and presenting technical information in an understandable way.

I've noticed that a lot of networking protocol articles are poorly organized, fail to provide a clear high-level explanation aimed at networking novices (for whom low-level technical details are just confusing), and fail to clearly distinguish between the protocols (defined methods of doing things), the standards (if any) that define them, and the software that implements them. I've started editing some of them with the aim of rectifying those shortcomings. I'll try to organize information into sections of increasing technical complexity, with a very general lede followed by a "How it's done" section that will hopefully be clear to networking novices. See localhost for the results of my first such attempt.

Also FWIW, I own and regularly use a bunch of PCs running various versions of Windows, Mac OS, and Ubuntu. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, and my opinions of them (and any other software I might write about) are based on actual first-hand experience over the past 30 years. Although I must and will keep those opinions out of any articles I write or edit, they might occasionally leak out in comments I add to their Talk pages. Please do not jump to the conclusion that I'm a fanboy of any persuasion--I AM NOT. (P.S. to this paragraph: I actually took my first computer programming course in 1969, but there were no PCs then — in fact, there was only one CRT terminal on campus!)