About

Valedictorian, Geek, Spanish speaker

I’m what people would call a geek. I don’t necessarily look or act like a geek anymore. But believe me - you could spot me and label me “Geek!” from 100 yards away, just some short 10 years back.

So in the past, I’ve been a System Administrator - of UNIX machines. Now, many people will not understand that statement. Basically, my job for a few years was to keep the servers (locked in the system cabinets) running, so the officers at their desks, in the mortgage loan offices could connect to the server and process loan applications. Everybody knows about Windows and MacOS these days. UNIX is like the grand-daddy of the current MacOS - which is based on Linux. Confused? Sorry…let’s just move on, shall we?

After that phase of my career, I moved into application support. I was very successful at that, and did work in 6 countries with a large international software company. I do have to say, my success at that time was probably 75% from technical skills, although I did have to communicate with the customers (that called or wrote to me in support), and our development team. But trust me - I had been an antisocial valedictorian in high school, and I wasn’t much improved after graduating from college.

Today’s People-Enabled Geek - an Internet Tech Helper

So fast-forward about 10 years, and I still have a better-than-average ability to understand computer things, especially on Linux or UNIX platforms. If you have a website “hosted”, it is a good chance that it runs on a flavor of Linux. I can help get things installed. If a program doesn’t work quite as you would like it to, I can help to modify it. And I have always worked to automate things. If you want to do automatic backukps or other things with your hosted website, the basic tool is called “cron” - a mis-spelled short version of Chronological Scheduler. Very UNIX-ie. Definitely an area I help people with.

But you don’t even need your own website to get a helping hand from me. Have you used an autoresponder? Need any help understanding the gad-blasted thing? How about setting up a membership site? Wordpress blogs? Podcasting?

I’m a techie. But one that is now people-enabled, and working to improve my marketing skills. But I have to admit, my tech skills are still more likely to pay the bills in a pinch.

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