Welcome to WilsoNet.com, the personal web space of me, (Jarod Wilson) and my family. I've had this domain name for years, and even operated as a private consultant under the flag of WilsoNet Technologies for some time. However, I'm currently _very_ happily employed full-time by Red Hat, so WilsoNet Technologies is essentially dormant. Such being the case, I use the domain to post stuff on the web that I think might be useful to the world, some stuff I just feel like posting even if its useless. I recently got around to setting up my own weblog here, where I occasionally scribble some random stuff, and some day, I hope to add a photo gallery (mostly for friends and family to see pictures of our kids). This domain also handles all my family's email.
This site design is derived from a design posted on oswd.org. Not all the links actually go somewhere useful at the moment, but it is my intention to flesh them all out when I have the time (which could very well mean never!). Feedback, suggestions and contributions are happily accepted (maybe I should get that feedback link working, eh?).
I was born in 1977, and raised in the Seattle area for the most part. In addition to Seattle, I've lived in Alexandria, VA (outside Washington, D.C.), where my younger brother was born, Portland, OR, Porterville, CA, Ukiah, CA, and Memphis, TN through the years, but I came back to the Seattle area after college. I met my wife Jamie while we were both in college in Porterville, CA. She is from there, I was there to play junior college baseball, which worked out nicely, and landed me a full athletic scholarship to pitch at the University of Memphis. I managed to drag Jamie along with me.
Turns out we absolutely hated the city of Memphis (nice place to visit, nosomuch when it comes to living there for two years -- way too different from the West Coast), so when my eligibility was up, we got the hell out of there and came back to the West Coast. I'm still 15 units short of a Computer Science degree, which I figured I'd have wrapped up by now, but I've learned so much more actually working than I ever did in college. Maybe if I went to a different school, that would be a different story... Oh yeah, I was actually a pretty decent pitcher and talked to a number of pro scouts, but I blew out my ankle in a freak pepper accident the first weekend of conference play my senior year. Good thing I didn't follow suit with all the other seniors and actually passed all my classes...
Anyhow, a few months after our triumphant return (okay, there was nothing triumphant about it) to Seattle, we'd both landed jobs and moved into a rental house (we'd been in my parents basement for a few weeks upon our return). A little while after that, we decided we wanted a kid. Part way through the pregnancy, we decided it'd be a half-decent idea to finally get one other detail out of the way, so we got married on a yacht on Lake Washington. Not long after that, we moved up in the world from our little rental house to a house we bought in Maple Valley, WA.
On September 21, 2002, a couple of months after moving into the new house, my wife gave birth to a baby boy, whom we named Preston. He's going to be throwing 95mph off the bump by the time he's 17, if things go according to my hopes. That, or he'll be QB'ing in the state championship. He's already showing quite a bit of athletic prowess, which is no surprise, given both of his parents played college athletics.
Then almost three years later to the day, on September 27, 2005, we welcomed a baby girl into the world, whom we named Kyla. She's a crack-up. Much of my spare time anymore is spent playing with one or the other (or both) of the kids.
In early 2006, I was offered a job at one of the maybe two companies I'd leave the Seattle area for, so we packed up our house in Maple Valley, Washington, and moved to Tyngsboro, Massachusetts. Fun drive. We've got a smaller house now, but its on an acre with a pool, and my commute to Red Hat's offices in Westford, MA is a mere 15 minutes (about 1/3 the time of the best commute I've had in like 4 years). To top it off, I absolutely love my job, so I'm not anticipating moving back to the west coast any time soon. Its awesome working around so many brilliant Linux minds every day, especially since its all Red Hat and Fedora all the time, me being the long-time Red Hat/Fedora user that I am.
I spend as much time as I can experimenting with computers. I've been addicted to 'em since my father first brought home a Mac SE in 1988. I was raised on a Mac, but my current primary desktop machine at home is a dual Opteron running Fedora Core (though my PowerBook G4 still runs Mac OS X most of the time). I also know Windows quite well. Where I make my living is in the Linux arena -- my last two jobs and current job revolve almost exclusively around Linux. This is also where I do almost all of my current experimenting. I got into Linux in the Red Hat Linux 4.2 days, though because I had Apple hardware, I actually used LinuxPPC most of the time. I didn't seriously get into Linux though until that first job I got when we came back to Seattle. The company ran almost its entire business on Red Hat Linux 6.2, so I dove in head-first. We gradually moved to 7.2 and 7.3, and somewhere along the line, the company put me through training and certification, so I became a Red Hat Certified Engineer. All my personal servers run Linux (mostly Red Hat/Fedora. I really haven't touched another distro since coming to Red Hat, nor do I really care to, except on occasion to see what the competition is up to. :)
I maintain a few documents on this web site pertaining to Linux projects I've undertaken. The big two are my filtering mail proxy write-up and MythTV on Fedora Core HOWTO. Well, actually, the mail filter one is grossly outdated now... I also frequent the MythTV mailing lists and irc channels, the Seattle-area Linux User Group mailing lists (GSLUG and TACLUG), some of Red Hat's mailing lists, the ATrpms mailing lists and a few other random ones. I've been a presenter from time to time at Seattle-area LUG meetings, and will likely do some engagements here in MA.
That's all I've got for now...