Resume

I love to make technology work for business. After all, if an IT solution doesn’t solve an accounting challenge, unlock a database mystery, or ensure 100% network reliability, what’s the point? I was trained as an accountant, and have a deep understanding of business fundamentals, but my passion lies with finding technology solutions that power business success.

My technical and functional expertise includes:

Technical:
  • Operating Systems | Windows (Desktop and Server), Linux, Apple Operating Systems
  • Virtualization | VMware, Hyper-V 
  • Applications | Active Directory, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Remote Desktop Services
  • Network Switches, Routers | Cisco, HP and Dell
  • Firewalls | Cisco, SonicWall, Sophos, Fortinet 
Functional:
  • Server and network infrastructure design, build, and support
  • Security
  • Backup and disaster recovery
  • IT Project Management

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome

Welcome to my blog! I began tinkering with computers since I was 13 and, after a wrong turn or two, was able to turn my hobby into a career. Over the years I have been fortunate enough to work on systems in Europe, Asia and Africa and am now plying my trade in North America as a Service Manager for a managed service provider in Canada. The one thing I have never lost (despite users best efforts to make me question my choice of career) is my passion for technology. I still spend my evenings and weekends tinkering with things and learning about stuff I am never going to use in my day job. The great resources that others have made available for free on the Internet have been invaluable in my ongoing quest to learn as much as I can about technology. This blog is my attempt to give something back and perhaps help someone in their search for knowledge. Just remember - you cannot Google experience!
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Smart Home

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Now that I have finally got round to getting a blog up and running I can start posting about some of the things I’ve been tinkering with... The last time I played around with micro-controllers, LED and resistors was in university so during the winter of 2015, when I started thinking about starting a hobby to pass the time, I decided to get an Arduino Starter Kit . I thought it would be a nice way to refresh my memory and expose my kids to the world of electronics. They liked the flashing lights and buzzing noises but got bored with typing code into the Arduino IDE. I, however, was hooked and started looking for something to build. IoT being all the rage, I decided to try and make my home "Smart". While doing my research I came across  MySensors , a web site focusing on do-it-yourself home automation and Internet of Things. Thanks to their excellent guides I was eventually able to build a small network of temperature and humidity sensors that communicated with a MQTT ga
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Pi-Touch

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A long time ago I realised that I'm driven by curiosity to learn new stuff regardless of whether or not I have anything to gain from learning it. For example, I use (and support) Windows at work, have a perfectly good Mac at home but do all my tinkering with a Linux laptop just to learn about all the main operating systems available today. I even switched from a perfectly good Ubuntu installation to Arch Linux simply because I wanted to explore another distribution. I also find myself re-inventing the wheel and building things, not because I have a need for them, but because I can. This is exactly what the Pi-Touch project I started in Spring 2017 is: a touchscreen clock radio that could easily have been created using a tablet and a few apps but which I chose to build myself using a Raspberry Pi 3 and an official 7" touchscreen .  There are many tutorials on the Internet for installing and configuring Music Player Daemon  and tons of examples on how to control the com
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