Good morning boys and girls! I'm so happy you've decided to stop by and take a peek, thanks!

I'm Rex - kind of a dinosaur, but a force of nature, I think, in the IT world. There are a lot of smart geeks out there. Young, old and in between. People that don't just do IT for a living but live breathe and eat the stuff.

I've been building computers, hosting online communities, and just generally tweaking computers since I was a kid, back in the dark days of acoustic couplers, the pure green glow of monochrome dumb terminals and the clackity clack of line and dot matrix printers. I've been up and down the IT river a number of times.

With more than a decades experience doing IT stuff for work and a decade before that doing it for fun I'm fairly certain I qualify for the rank "Uber-Geek". But at the same time I'm experienced enough to know that there are huge swathes of knowledge I don't have. Complete dark areas that I kind of know exist but have never ventured in to. What I love most about this world of technology are the ever growing new grounds yearning to be exploit...er explored.

I don't just *use* other technologies. I carve out spaces and chunks and resources and setup systems and support and maintain them. I blend technologies and systems to accomplish tasks or serve a need (real or imagined).

I'm going to try very hard to not make this a real whiny blog - so many people come out and write a blog to bash apple, or bash microsoft or to hold up one particular variety of linux over all others. It is to separate their technology as superior and reinforce their decision to purchase it or invest time in it by garnering support from like minded people. Bullshit.

Now I admit that I do have some strong opinions. They are just opinions and nothing more. When I make decisions about what kind of software or hardware I deploy please understand it's from my personal perspective that I'm making that decision. Sure - There may be a great ABC solution out there for just what I'm trying to do but it may not be compatible with T..Z that I already have deployed. Please respect my decisions and I will continue to respect yours.

I won't be doing any *Nix vs Windows bullshit here but I will try to explain why I choose the OS or component I use for a specific application. I always reach for the "best" tool in the drawer. May not be the sharpest or the shiniest. I don't always have time to check each new tool that comes out. So, a lot of the time I grab the tried and true ones that I know the best.

What this blog is going to try and do is give you a peek into some pretty hard core computer geekness. I'll be talking about the projects I'm working on, thinking about and involved in. Since I do a lot of IT work for other people I will be changing names to protect the innocent and all that good stuff.

I thought long and hard about security issues and blogging. I can't just go out and tell you the exact layout and configuration of say, my firewall. Or the server and access configurations for my remote hosting services...or the configurations where I work. Especially when you consider that one of my mantra's is "Security Through Obscurity".

Why password protect a system that is invisible, unreachable and nobody knows anything about? Well, because someday someone will find it and it's only a matter of time, and if they really want "in" all the passwords in the world won't stop them. So, for the sake of argument and obscurity I will not be releasing my own name, I will setup some kind of email address for people that do want to contact me and I'll host my blog here out in the open. One blog among thousands (it's own kind of obscurity) even thought I have servers and bandwidth and expertise to run a completely custom blog of my own.

Okay, that's about all the small talk I have a stomach for today. Now on with the technobabble!