About Me
Instead of a long, pretentious autobiography, I think it would be more fun to just list a bunch of random facts about myself:
Hi.
- In the real world, I’m just Mike (not Michael).
- I was born in Danbury Connecticut on September 4th, 1979.
- I currently live in Broomfield Colorado.
- My primary professional interests are in the design and implementation of automated IT infrastructure (preferably in a Linux-centric environment). Most of what I do can probably be summed up by this new “DevOps” term that’s been floating around the net lately.
- I am Chief Infrastructure Engineer at SocialMedia.com.
- I enjoy programming, but I tend to get bored when I do nothing but that for eight hours a day. Therefore, I tend to think of programming as just another (but very important) tool in my sysadmin arsenal.
- I’m a perfectionist.
- I’ve lived in a lot of places.
- I’ve been an avid skateboarder (and occasional snowboarder) since 1991.
- I’m a self-taught drummer, and I’ve been playing since about 1997.
- I’ve been a strict vegetarian since 1995. I don’t know if there’s a technical term for my particular “variety” of vegetarianism, but I try not to eat or wear anything derived from dead animals. This means I’ll drink milk and eat cheese, but I won’t wear things like fur or leather.
- Tony Conigliaro is supposedly a distant relative of mine. I don’t follow baseball at all, but this fact seems to be a big deal to people who do.
- Sometime in 2004, I decided it was ridiculous that I had never learned to drive anything with a manual transmission. Since I was in need of a new car anyway, I bought a slightly-used 2004 Honda Civic Si (a car that has no option for an automatic transmission) and taught myself to drive it on the way home.
- Growing up, I was actually discouraged from studying computer science, because “the math is hard” and “I’ll never make it.” Then I used my own money to buy my first computer in 1997 and eventually proved everyone wrong.
- I think I do a lot of things simply to prove people wrong, but I’m not sure what this says about me. ;-)
- I plan on owning a Lotus someday.
- I can’t stand when the necks on my shirts get stretched out, and it makes me a little uncomfortable to see other people wearing shirts with stretched out necks. I don’t understand how anyone could live like that.
- I’ve always had trouble learning things that I don’t know how to apply practically. I believe this is why I’ve always struggled with advanced mathematics, but excelled in anything having to do with computers.
- I’ve traveled quite a bit inside the United States, but not much outside it. This is mostly due to my irrational fear of getting thrown into a foreign prison for breaking an obscure law I wasn’t aware of and/or not being allowed back into the US. I guess I’ve watched too many movies.
- I’ve had “blogs” on various domains since before the term existed. I published my first web page in 1996.
I’ll write more about who I am later.
About conigliaro.org
This site is hosted by a server in my “Ultimate” Dual-Monitor Rackmount Home Computing Environment.