グレェ「grey」
@byterhymer

This byterhymer is a teajay & more. Writin this in rhyme form instead of a bore. Pardon the vernacular, the code I tweak is sometimes a debuggin chore.

Skratched vinyl back in the 1970s. Played trumpet in the Monterey Jazz Festival with an ensemble as a stage opener. Whose? Headliner: Dizzy Gillespie's! That was before I was a teenager, scholarship granted in middle school, I did not displease.

Even younger, I was buildin hardware & writin code. You've benefitted from some of it, though unlike this, that wasn't rhyme, prose nor an ode. Back in 2013 I helped patch CVE-2013-4854 actively being exploited against BIND (the reference DNS server from ISC) when it was still embargoed.

Since 2005 I have been an editor for undeadly.org too. Even earlier when it was deadly I submitted stories which got published numberin more than a few.

With MacPorts I maintain libressl, libressl-devel, got, snac and have submitted PRs merged for other Portfiles as well. Doin my best to eliminate forms of dependency hell.

Offline, my life is sometimes not so sweet. I'm divorced, a parent with estranged adult children and I'm still strugglin with homelessness, not neat!

Despite that I've still managed to find time to train in turntablism with DJ Q*Bert and the ThudRumble crew! I should also mention SOMAHH (School of Martial Arts And Hip Hop) Merasil Academy and give DJ JOILL, Bitesize and their cardio kickboxin workout class offered freely in 2022 its fair due.

I'm a student of the Temple of Hip Hop and have artistic works personally signed by many more than KRS-One. At many clubs and festivals, I've poured tea, herbal tisanes, deejayed and spun!

Perhaps you've heard of LIB? Maybe Oregon Eclipse Festival, DNALounge or The Blue Lagoon in Santa Cruz? Though I have teajayed no where recently. The pandemic put a damper on my sharin of tunes and tea.

Even when I was on-call 24/7 with a "low six figure" salary? Workin as a Senior System Administrator in ops and IT? Nothing has done much to alleviate my poverty. Of course if you divide that yearly salary. Instead of estimating a 40 hour work week sincerely: Getting paged 24x7, often to fix others' broken code, what would be the hourly? Do the arithmetic: some places that works out to $15/hr, lower than some locale's minimum hourly wage, what a travesty! Moreover, that was the peak of my fiscal prosperity. Many other places I have worked for much less, or was not even paid at all, even if I wasn't volunteerin for free!

Of course, I will happily volunteer my time if that is known at the outset, not unpaid, retroactively. There are a lot of corrupt people out there, eager to rip off someone as independent as me. Apparently. So, consulting has not been lucrative, personally. How others figured such things out is a mystery. Moreover, I want to do things other than focus on profitability. Though of course that is part of any business recipe.

I facilitated the first HD live streamin websites for an employer which was online before Google, really! For most it would be NSFW given the nature of it being pornography? I was not in front of the cameras, not even as blessed an extra, typically. Instead buildin out data centers, modifying firewalls, VPN concentrators, load balancers, NAS devices, SMTP MXes, DNS servers, routers, switches and MUCH MUCH more, without enumerating such things exhaustively.

I was also a sysadmin at Podomatic, which implemented podcasts before Apple's iTunes/Music had support for such things, gee!

Not to mention I consulted for iXSystems, formerly known as BSDi, once upon litigated against by USL otherwise known as the UNIX System Laboratories of that convicted monopoly: AT&T.

Aside from workin as a wage slave in the realms of the bleeding edge with even the likes of Fortune 1 using some of my technology. I've been involved with labors of love such as software preservation, for posterity! I used to work for The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment which has a Library of Congress granted DMCA exemption, not outright piracy. In 2009 I was even cited in USENIX for having helped restore a version of UNIX older than C! Which was originally written for the PDP-11/20.

As for academic accolades? I graduated with a B.A. in 言語研究「gengokenkyū」(Language Studies, focused on Japanese) from UCSC. Where, not for credit, but for the love of the art I made and screened a free fansub of もののけ姫「mono no ke hime」(Princess of the Spirit) by 宮崎 駿 aka Hayao Miyazaki.

Extracurricularly? I was a co-founder of Noisebridge, a hackerspace of the type 501c3. I'm also one of the first four members of ThudRumble's Club numbered: 33.3. I led a panel at ToorCon and was staff at REcon.cx and when in high school and college founded anime and manga and computer clubs numberin at least three?

You may be wonderin: how does that any of that relate to spirituality? I am a student of Nyingma Buddhist Mysticism, yet not exclusively. I think that there is something similar about code portability. Though this may not be the right place to attempt to express that kind of complexity? That a true message may transcend a mortal coil or hardware architecture's implementation singularity? Similar to a song being able to be sung or played with instrumentation or orchestration in plurality!

Maybe I should also mention that I am back on the wagon, with more than three years of sobriety?

I've been a student of the 道「dào」which some translate as the Way. As a child I was raised in an unusual 'Murican matriarchal sect of Christian Science where they would pray.

I've studied multiple versions of the श्रीमद्भगवद्गीता「śrīmadbhagavadgītā」and various sutras too. Which is to say, I am a life long learner, seeking wisdom and esoterica in systems which merit their due. I have various meditation exercises and practices and was even invited to be part of the compsec think tank known as: w00w00!

I've been online longer than the World Wide Web. Though I've met Tim Berners-Lee, I was personal friends with Doug Engelbart instead.

In different times I was a co-PockyOp of Tetsuo Shima's WWWA. The BBS era so old, before I used the handle of grey. I was also a co-SysOp of VisionSoft and more 408 BBSes lost to time. I could write more, but this is probably about enough for a librepay rhyme?

Thank you for your generosity! I am grateful for every ￥en and U$D.