Alameth Systems

Welcome to my business card website.

There's not a whole lot here. In my younger days I created new websites for fun, and ran several sites for serious. I was expecting to fully build out this site, plus a half dozen others for which I bought domain names. But family, church, and photography expanded to occupy my non-work time. Most of my “great ideas” were long ago built by someone else. (And they did a better job than I would have.) So now I mostly use hosted services like Squarespace and SmugMug, while my small forest of domains are mostly used for spamtraps and honeypots.

Pre-Retirement Bio

Thank you Erika for this pic. It's me!
Networking and Security Software Engineer with 45 years of professional experience in every phase of product development, from conception through end-of-life. Shipped products for a broad range of platforms, including embedded, appliance, packaged software, and hosted services. Roles have ranged from individual contributor to project architect, on teams from 2 to 50 developers. Expertise in platforms, network layer 4 down, kernel and drivers, and security infrastructure. Keenly interested in software quality, availability, and serviceability.

Post-Retirement Bio

Genealogist, photograher, history buff, open source software developer, and volunteer “data guy” for a number of projects in the Japanese American history community. My current project is a catalog of the “ordinary” sites of The Incarceration: the storefronts, school gyms, community halls, train stations, and church parish halls that were leased by the United States Employment Service at the behest of the WCCA for use as Civil Control Stations and Points of Departure.

Unprofessional Bio

I started taking stuff apart (and trying to put it back together) at age 3. It's only by the Grace of God I wasn't electrocuted. You think your kids were bad in a shopping mall? I'd find the emergency cutoff switch for the escalators. Right at eye level for a 3 year old. And it said “PUSH” right on it, so....

For my 4th birthday my uncle gave me a cigar box that contained a light switch, a bulb, and a battery. I would sit for hours just turning the light on and off. It kept me entertained and out of the house wiring.

Do not disturb. Nerd at work.
At age 13 I was introduced to an ASR-33 teletype connected to our school's HP-2000F computer. It was love at first sight. I wrote games, learned the fundamentals of system breaking, and argued with my teachers over submitting term papers in all upper case. I ported my games to a Tektronix 4023 graphics terminal, designed and built digital hardware, programmed microprocessors, and competed nationally in industrial electronics (which had just all gone digital).

After a failed attempt to earn an Electrical Engineering degree, I spent a year as a lab rat and instructor at Michigan Tech, then came to Silicon Valley “to work for a few years.” I wrote software for graphics, embedded I/O, filesystems, networking, Email, and platforms, largely making my mark by working on projects no one else wanted to work on. I developed a keen interest in software reliability, serviceability, maintainability, and security, all of which are largely facets of the same problem.

Bar hopping with your kids is fun! Who knew?
Somehow along the way I managed to get married and raise 3 kids, which quashed any notions of moving back to the Midwest. My kids got interested in a lot of things — baseball, soccer, music, marching band, volunteering — and I got interested in those too, camera in hand. They're all grown now, financially independent, still speaking to me, and they're really good people, too. Whether that's because of me or in spite of me remains unclear.

I indefinitely left the workforce in July 2023. I'm usually hacking, researching family history, taking pictures, or engaged in one of my or my wife's volunteer projects. To the outside observer I'm pretty sure I look like a boring old nerd; but my life has been full and blessed indeed.

My Websites

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