A little about me...

Hi, I'm Shad. No, my best friend's names aren't Meshack and Abednego, and I'm not named after a fish. I was lucky enough to marry a lovely woman and together we've had six (6) beautiful daughters. The girls range in age from 11 down to the twins at 2 years old.

Internet infrastructure has become my specialty. Want a web site running on 60 + servers load balanced between two data centers on opposite sides of the country? No problem, I'm your man. I'm a server hardware, wires, and operating systems kinda guy. I AM NOT a developer. Writing code is not my thing. That being said, I've written my fair share of code. The majority of it has been classic ASP VBScript code with a little bit of ASP.NET.

I've been working with the Internet for over 10 years now. I started my career as a lowly tech support agent for America Online and worked hard to learn everything I needed to know to support applications on the Internet. It became my passion so to speak. After AOL, I worked for US Robotics supporting PCMCIA (People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms) modems and network cards. When USR was purchased by 3COM, I was laid off. I took the opportunity to get all the classes and training that I needed to get my MCSE certification. After several years of short term contracts at Novell, Intel, and several other companies, I ended up at a national Internet Service Provider. Ikano Communications. Ikano isn't an ISP in the traditional sense. They provide back end services for smaller ISPs. Dial up authentication, web and mail hosting, billing, callcenter support, DSL, wireless internet, etc. I believe at one point the company was one of the 10 largest ISPs in the country if you combined all the smaller ISPs we provided services for. While there I managed hundreds of servers serving thousands of web sites and hundreds of thousands of email boxes. I set up my first load balanced web farm. Ah, the fond memories I have. I gained a ton of knowledge and experience in my four and a half years there.

I left Ikano to work for a supply chain management company. I was there for about a year before I left and ended up where I am currently employed. I've been there for almost two years now. I am one of two main web administrators for one of the country's largest low fare airlines. I'm responsible for a web site that brings in over 10 million in sales almost every day. There's a lot involved in running an environment that large. I will most likely post about my challenges and triumphs from work here in my blog as there are some things going on there that are definitely applicable here. The main focus of this blog however, is going to be on my little side gig, my night job, my pain in the arse, myLargescale.com