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All about Jeff

Who is Jeff?

Jeff was born in the mid 1970's in a place called Roanoke, Virginia. He was raised in Salem until 2000 when he moved to Durham, North Carolina to begin a real career in Information Technology at Red Hat. After finding himself married, he bought a small bit of land in Chatham County, North Carolina where he currently resides with his wife, four dogs, three cats, two snakes, two fish two turtles, several computers, cars, a boat, and the other effluvia of one who has put down roots.

Jeff works full for IBM on the RTP campus. He beta tests Red Hat and Novell Enterprise Linux distros on IBM's full line of eServer xSeries machines. He is also the team Xen lead. In addition to beta testing the NOSs, he also maintains the testbed LAN, Fiber Channel Storage, automation scripts, testlan Server, DNS, DHCP. He also is the de-facto technical lead on the internal eServer and Intellistation Red Hat Ready Hardware Certification efforts and spends a lot of time putting out fires.

In May of 2006, Jeff finally managed to nail down that 10 year AS degree. Over the last couple years, he worked his ass off taking a full course load (and then some) often learning several programming languages simultaneously. He did manage to graduate though, with a 3.9 GPA. He graduated with Honors as a member of Alpha Theta Tau from Central Carolina Community College. Currently, he is taking a sanity break and plans to look for a more sedately paced BS program to finish off the undergrad stuff.

In a past life, Jeff was an Advanced Life Support EMS provider in Virginia He serverd full time as a volunteer at the Fort Lewis Volunteer Rescue Squad as well as working full time at United Ambulance Service and for a time at the Lewis Gale Clinic Orthopaedics Dept. He spent many sleepless nights in the local ERs pulling clinical hours and many more sleepless nights on the ambulance dealing with some of the worst moments imaginable. Somehow, he managed to survive it more or less intact.

Outside of work and school, Jeff is passionate about learning to fly, and is seeking a Private Pilot's license. He also holds a General Class FCC Amateur Radio license, call sign W4KDH. Jeff likes the challenge of QRP operation and operates both VHF and HF at low power. He enjoys saltwater fishing and is the owner of the NC Saltwater Fishing group at Yahoo! Groups, and owns a 23 foot Four Winns Sundowner boat that proudly adorns his yard (Until he can get the trailer brakes and exhaust baffles replaced).

He is also addicted to Microsoft Flight Simulator (which is odd considering that he is almost a typical Linux zealot), reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, movies, jazz, techno, video games and many many other things that drive his very tolerant wife nuts.

Jeff also really hates talking about himself in the third person. Ironic, isn't it?