When coax ruled the world (or, your humble author enters the scene)
I used to work at the Univeristy of Washington (UW) for a guy named Stan who was a home brewing and bungee jumping nut. He also was pretty darn good at TCP/IP networking. When Stan wasn't busy slurping on his ramen noodles, (they were inexpensive and the savings went to jumping off of things with a cord tied to his legs or hops, barley and yeast,) he would explain the finer points of TCP/IP networking.
I learned about IP, TCP, ICMP, etc. and how to troubleshoot all sorts of arcane protocol problems that have since been solved. We've created a bunch of new problems, but that's a different post for a different day!
TCP in particular, with its three-way handshaking, is foundational to the working of the world wide web. Deceptively simple, it's creation by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn has been compared with Gutenberg's creation of movable type and the printing press. Unlike Gutenberg, these guys are still alive, so shake their hand the next time you bump into them. (Vint's easy to spot, he's always wearing a vested suit.)
But back to jumping - I jumped out of the UW after setting up a web server in the spring of 1994 and have been involved in one way or another with web publishing and communications since. I founded a web hosting business that serves mom-and-pop businesses all the way up to Fortune 50's and everything in-between, including NGOs and GOs.
Today, I am Lead Site Manager for TechNet and the people on my team bring you the TechCenters. I've been with Microsoft now for a bit over two years and I was the Site Manager for the SQL Server Tech and Dev Centers, and most recently have been working to redesign a TechCenter that we'll unwrap just before TechEd.
I'll be using this blog to keep you up to date on what we're doing on TechNet (and sometimes MSDN and Expression) along with occasional forays into rants and opinions about the web in general.
If you have suggestions about how to impove the TechNet web experience, check out the TechNet Web Feedback Forum and join the conversation there or leave a comment here.
Cheers!
FIN
(Fixed typo.)
