Chris Knight: WireHead!

Did you have MotorHeads in your high school? Students who took every auto shop class, who drove tricked out cars with humble beginnings, who no matter what they did with their lives would always love their cars? The kind of person who might wear a shirt and tie by day, but who rebuilds classic cars for a hobby? The kind of person you would never ask for a tune-up, but after a Saturday afternoon popping cold ones in the garage your car now gets 5 more miles per gallon and can bark the tires going into third gear.

When it comes to computers I'm a WireHead. I prefer to build my own computers when possible. (OK, I didn't build my laptop or the Sun boxes.) I've been taking apart electronic equipment for as long as I can remember. (Since about age eight I've been putting it back correctly!) In college I took a part time job building and repairing computers which gave me the knowledge that let me springboard out to San Francisco. Soon after moving to San Francisco I graduated beyond mere computer repair; but I'll always keep those skills honed on my machines and occasionally those of my friends. Even when I was setting the desktop computer standards for a six thousand employee multi-national shipping company I stripped down and rebuilt my machine to get the most out of it.

Computers have come a long way since I first learned to program on an Apple ][+. Graphical interfaces, a global network, cheap mass storage and sound cards (yes, sound cards) have made personal computers not only possible but desirable as well. Even though the 'Internet Boom' has faded to an echo now, there is no doubt that the Internet has become a permanent part of modern life. My interest in computers naturally encompassed Internet connected servers and now my home network rivals that of many small businesses. From my home office I manage the internet presence of Mixman Technologies, as well as my personal sites and those of a few select friends. You can click on the picture above for a detailed breakdown.

I run FreeBSD on the majority of my servers, with the occasional Linux based game server. I compile my unix software from source and try to stay away from software distributed in RedHat Linux RPM files. I keep the Sun boxes behind firewalls, and I rebuild my FreeBSD kernel once a month during my maintenance window. I've had two linux boxes cracked over the years, and I'd never use Linux on a box that I cared about that was exposed to the outside world. I'm sure I'll get hate mail over this, but there is too little control over what goes into most of the Linux distributions. RedHat has centralized control, but after their IPO they became bound to shareholder expectations and security will always take a backseat to quarterly deliverables. What can I say, I'm an opinionated WireHead. :)

This is my hobby. It takes up a room in my house instead of a bay in my garage. Clients pay in cash for the skills my hobby has imprinted; friends pay in single malt scotch. I may not always make my living with computers, but to me they'll always be fun.

-Chris