But I took a personal interest in Linux in the late 90s, and made it an integral part of my personal IT projects. And later, I took what I learned and used it for side consulting projects.

I started out with self-hosting my domains. I realized that a large portion of the internet ran on Linux and Unix. So I decided to learn more. I started out with building out web and email hosting on Red Hat. I used both servers that I built from parts I bought at Fry’s and Newegg, and virtual private servers from providers such as Linode.

As time went by, I started getting more and more spam from my domains. And since they were MY domains I didn’t want to change email addresses. So I taught myself how to build and tune SpamAssassin. There was a time where my SpamAssassin installs were 50-75% more effective than commercial hosting. Most providers have gotten much more serious about filtering by now, so it’s no longer worth the time and effort to do it myself.

I learned even more when I switched to using the Gentoo distribution for my servers. The Gentoo DIY, build from source ethos drives you to find out more about how things fit together.

When VPN started showing up in the corporate environment, I quickly saw the flexibility that offered so I dug into building my own. I built a number of routers for my home network and even a consulting client or two using embedded linux firewall distributions such as LEAF, Bering, IPCop, and Smoothwall. I ran my home network on these for several years along with OpenVPN for remote access.

The next frontier that I took on was storage. I had a number of computers around the house, and I wanted them backed up. I tried a number of storage server solutions. After playing with FreeNAS, Nexenta, and OpenFiler I ended up running an OpenFiler box for several years. The one downside was that I never found a totally seamless and automated client backup package. I ended up switching to Windows Home Server because it works in a very reliable and transparent fashion.

Around that time, I’d say 5 years or so ago, virtualization became a much larger part of the IT picture. I saw it showing up in a lot of places, and I thought it would be cool to have one big physical server that could run all the different things I had going on my home network.

I experimented with Xen Server, KVM, VMWare ESXi, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, and more. Unfortunately all of them seemed to have a lot of IO overhead at that time, so I was disappointed with the performance, particularly for client backups. I ran ESXi and Hyper-V for a while, then later went back to a standalone WHS server and an Ubuntu server.

When I became an expat I gave up my elaborate home network. Now I just use a Synology NAS unit for file sharing and that’s it. Which runs embedded linux. So if need be I can open up an SSH connection and log in.

And as it turns out, I did work with Linux and Solaris during the day a few times too. I worked on a C application on Red Hat to enable bill of materials upload for Intel a few years back. And the Oracle servers that I worked with at Deutsche Bank ran on Solaris. I did some systems maintenance and some text file imports while I was there.

Over the years, I have also taken on a number of side consulting projects. A number of those have involved Linux, PHP, MySQL, and Postgres. I migrated a customer’s website from ASP.NET and SQL Server on Windows to PHP and MySQL, worked with a team of Python/Django developers to migrate a Cold Fusion and SQL Server app to PostGres, and I’m currently working on migrating an IBM/Rocket U2 ERP database running on Unixware (I’d say “ugh”, but SCO would probably sue me!) to SQL Server.

One more factor has driven my experience with the *nix platform. In 2011, I started another side business to develop mobile applications for the app store and sell mobile development services. While I’m no longer directly involved in that business, being involved with building iPhone apps drove me to switch from a Windows notebook (I was a longtime Thinkpad user) to a Macbook. I’ve found that I really like having the bash shell terminal prompt close by. I’ve installed Python, Django, Postgres, MySQL, Apache, Ruby, Rails, and more on my Mac to support various explorations.

So yes, I’m both comfortable and competent in Linux. Not an uber-nerd or kernel contributor, but I can definitely get around and get things done.

So, what of the last three years?  Expat life has been good. Lots of travel, lots of learning, and a bit of self discovery. In many ways I’d like to keep it going. But family ties and professional development interests are leading back to the US at least for now. I’ll miss SE Asia. I do hope to spend more time in this part of the world. Our time here taught us that we can live with much less than we had when we lived in the US.  The challenge will be maintaining that level of minimalism after our return.

I’ll save the detailed travelogue and observations about life in Asia for future posts. For now, let’s talk about data science, big data, and mobile apps. My adventures in mobile startup land taught me that I have more love for databases, servers, backend services, and data in general than I do for mobile apps. This corresponds nicely to the recent upswing in interest in big data and data science.

While data science is multidisciplinary and definitions vary, it depends on three core skills as visualized on Drew Conway’s Data Science Venn diagram. I’m very confident in my hacking skills, and my love for reading and ongoing curiosity gives me a good foundation on the substantive expertise side. The one remaining gap is math and statistics knowledge. While I loved math and did very well in high school, I didn’t follow through in college.

While there are plenty of good schools in Asia, it’s easier and faster for me to address that math and statistics gap in the US.  Of course academic knowledge is one thing, and hands on experience is another. I want to focus on both. I decided that moving to the center of the Big Data universe in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area would be a great way to do that. Plus it doesn’t hurt that Stanford and Berkeley are in that area. So I bought one way tickets to San Francisco. I’m also looking at Vegas and Austin – data driven decision making dictates that lower cost and lower tax areas also merit consideration

I’m really looking forward to seeing how this next adventure plays out.  If you’re looking for a solid database guy with data scientist potential let’s talk.

PS: Apologies to lumberjacks and Monty Python fans everywhere for the title.

Until this gets resolved, feel free to use my Gmail address miks2u-at-gmail.com to bypass the problem.

We are very concerned for Marissa’s aunts, sisters and younger brother that live in Ilocos Sur.  They are on the northwest coast near the South China Sea, which hopefully wasn’t damaged as much as the Pacific coast on the east.  But it’s quite likely that they faced 160-180kph (100-110mph) winds.  Marissa has not heard from them as of yet.  I am hoping that we will get confirmation that everybody is OK later today.

I strongly encourage you to donate to relief efforts, as many people will have lost their homes and their livelihood.  We plan to give to Marissa’s family directly to help with building damage and crop loss as well as donating to general relief efforts.

We had a rude surprise as we checked in for our flight from Portland to Honolulu and Manila.  Hawaiian Airlines charged us extra baggage fees for our Portland to Honolulu leg.  This is the first time we have ever been charged extra for luggage on an international itinerary.  Thankfully I was able to add the additional charges to my expense report.  But I’ll definitely have to keep that in mind for future trips.  Other than that I liked Hawaiian well enough. 

We arrived in Honolulu as expected, but made the mistake of walking to baggage claim rather than riding the shuttle bus.  We got there just fine but it was a bit of a trek. 

We found out that we couldn’t check our bags through to Manila from Portland, so we had to get our overstuffed bags out of baggage claim, drag them to the Hertz shuttle bus, and keep them with us overnight. 

That proved to be a problem as we had reserved an intermediate car.  There was no way that three big rolling duffels, a large suitcase, a smaller suitcase and 3 carryons were going in the trunk of a Nissan Altima.  Thankfully Hertz was able to upgrade me to a Ford Flex on the spot.  Everything fit into the Flex just fine.  I have been wanting to try the Flex, as I’ve heard a lot of good things about it.  I found that it compared very favorably to our Explorer.

One great thing about being married to a Filipina is that she has friends all over the world.  Due to the lack of opportunity in the Philippines, many Filipinos emigrate to elsewhere in the world in search of better employment or business opportunities.  Marissa has friends in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, Israel, Italy, Spain, the UK, most states of the US, Canada, and more.  It’s truly a global community.  For our stopover in Hawaii she tracked down college classmate Joelle Anne.  Joelle Anne totally hooked us up with a hotel room right on Waikiki Beach at an employee discount rate.  We spent some time hanging out on the beach, let the kids play in the surf, and caught up with old friends.

Later on we went out to dinner.  The funny thing was that we ended up going to Todai, a seafood buffet restaurant that also has a location in Portland.  It had been a long time since we went to the Portland Todai, so it was nice to have an opportunity to go there again. 

On Sunday morning I got up early and enjoyed some quiet time on the beach watching the waves and the surfers.  I even saw a couple practicing tandem surfing.  It looks hard enough doing lifts on a dance floor or ice rink.  I can’t imagine how difficult it must be to do acrobatics on a surfboard while riding a wave.

All too soon it was time to head back to the airport for the next leg of our journey.  For the most part the flight was long but uneventful.  We were definitely thankful for Nintendo DS.  My seatmate for the long flight was very congenial. He was headed to the Philippines for both business and personal reasons.  I suspect that the personal side of his trip will work out, but there was more uncertainty around the business side.  But my guess is that he will do well.

• Committed to a new job based on a few phone interviews.
• Left my job at Intel after 12 great years.
• Sold or gave away a huge portion of our stuff including our cars.
• Packed everything we decided to keep into a 3000lb sea cargo shipment and what we could take as airline checked baggage.
• Said goodbye to friends and family.
• Got on a plane, flew halfway around the world.
• Started the new job knowing nearly nothing about what I was getting into.

In my previous post about the move I discussed the considerations and decision process behind choosing my new job.  Once we made the decision and worked out the timeline, the next step was figuring out when to leave and what to take with us.  I was prepared to be all minimalist – sell everything that wouldn’t fit into checked bags and start over.  But my new employer included a full relocation in the package that they offered me.  I asked if they would give me additional cash instead of paying to move my stuff, but they would not.  Too bad, I would have rather had the money.  In the end we decided to move a selected subset of our furniture in hopes that we would be able to save money by renting an unfurnished place.

Once we decided to go forward with the sea cargo shipment it occurred to us that we should go to Costco and stock up on items that are hard to find or expensive in the Philippines.  $800 later we had a big stack of goodies in the family room when the movers showed up.

It really started to sink in that everything was changing after we sold our beds and the movers picked up the sea cargo shipment.  We ended up essentially camping in an empty house for our last week.

Our last week was a whirlwind of last minute preparations and saying goodbye to family and friends.  It’s one of life’s ironies that after you’ve made the decision to move away that you renew and refresh friendships with people you haven’t seen for a while.  I was really reminded of what a great group of friends we have around the Portland area.  Thankfully social media lets us stay in touch virtually, but of course it’s not the same.

I’ve come to realize that this story is very long, so I’ll leave off here and pick up next time with the details of the flight itself and our stopover in Hawaii.

By now you may be wondering OK, what’s the big deal anyway?  It’s this: I have been interested in living and working in another country for a number of years now.  I always thought that it was unlikely that it would actually happen.  But it did, and what’s more, I was actually offered two very different positions in two very different places.

The first position was a systems engineering and information security job in Kuwait working as a civilian contractor at a US military base.  The second position was a data modeler and reporting lead for a large investment bank in the Philippines.  I was offered the Kuwait position first.  The money was really good, so I accepted.  Then a few days later the Philippines offer came through.  It was for less money, so at first I thought I’d stick with the Kuwait job. But then I started really looking at the numbers and realized that I wasn’t taking cost of living and travel costs into account.  When I factored that in, everything came out pretty close, and both positions penciled out significantly ahead of my current situation. 

In the end, I chose the Philippines, because the Kuwait position required a 60 hour per week schedule, and I felt that the weather and the culture would be less amenable to my family.  My wife is from the Philippines, so I already have a fair idea what to expect there.  Yes, there are some some things that aren’t as nice as in the US, but it will be a good experience for us and our kids, at least for a while.  And we should be able to save some money too.

The other advantage to going to the Philippines is that I have long had an interest in building outsource businesses.  The Philippines has become a significant outsourcing destination over the last few years.  I definitely have a lot of great ideas for startups that I should really be able to kick into gear after I get there. 

We are scheduled to leave Portland on August 28.  So it’s coming right at us.  We definitely have a TON of things to get done before we leave.  The big moving sale is planned for next weekend (August 14 and 15), and there will be lots of stuff going on craigslist. 

There’s a lot more of this story to be told, but I’ll save those thoughts for future posts.  Stay tuned…

As I thought about how to reconcile those two viewpoints, it occurred to me that perhaps it would be possible to combine the best of both ideas by looking for an overarching theme or business objective that ties together multiple skillsets.  In other words, build a higher level niche where the value proposition is that the whole of the combined skills is greater than the sum of the parts.

In my case, I have a strong background in enterprise software development, database administration, and network engineering.  I also recently kicked off a project to add information security to my portfolio.  That left me wondering whether I was a developer, engineer, or security guy.  Then I remembered a comment that Buck Woody from Microsoft made during a presentation to my local SQL developer’s group meeting last month.  He pointed out that he thought of himself as a Data Professional, not just a DBA.

I can position the Data Professional role as an umbrella concept that can encompass the development, DBA, network and security skillsets. As a Data Professional I can deliver value by enabling a business to create, interact with, and securely store their data. That may consist of coding an application that accesses data in a database (developer), optimizing SQL queries (DBA), developing and implementing a backup strategy (DBA, infrastructure), adopting encrypted storage (security), designing an enclave network to keep data safe (network, security), or developing and deploying a business continuity and disaster recovery plan (security).

This concept can apply to any group of skills, not just IT.  It’s important to remember that when you’re marketing yourself (or anything else for that matter), it’s always about benefits, not features.  Employers and customers don’t care if you’re a Renaissance man.  Skills and experience are only of value to the extent that they fill a customer or employer need.  The challenge is to find the overlap between your interests and specific needs that customers or employers find valuable, then find ways to map your skills and experience to those needs.

If you’re in a bad housing situation, don’t just wait and hope it will get better.  There are no guarantees and few indications that things will significantly improve any time soon.

I have three friends that are also involved with short sales.  One is selling and two are buying.  The friend that is selling has a clean offer, but it’s for less than the lender thinks the house is worth.  The lender needs to do their homework – the house needs a lot of repairs and won’t bring the money that the lender thinks that it will.

One of my buyer friends just finished his purchase.  It turned out to be quite an ordeal, in part because he used VA financing.  The VA inspector demanded some repairs which the lender and the seller refused to pay for.  He had a solid approval, so he chose to go ahead and pay for the repairs out of pocket.  That was a brave and in my opinion risky choice, but it worked out.  He closed a couple weeks ago and is now moved in.

My other buyer friend is thus far in a less desirable position.  He found a house that he very much likes, put together a deal, and made an offer.  Again, the second won’t release liability.  But in his case, the seller refuses to close unless both the first and second mortgage holders release her from liability.  I really don’t understand why these second mortgage holders take this approach.  In most cases, the homeowner would keep the house and keep making the payments if they were not in financial distress.  How can lenders think that they will really recover enough from a homeowner that has already decided to walk for it to be worth the effort?  I just don’t understand the rationale.  All I can think of is that they want to keep the loans on their books as an asset regardless of whether they are performing or not.  You can read more about this sale at http://wellsfargolies.blogspot.com/.

All in all, the pain is far from over.  There just aren’t any economic indicators showing that demand will increase, and it will likely decrease when the tax rebates expire.  I’ll be interested to see how things play out over the next few years.