Greetings
You’ve either stumbled upon or been craftily guided here. Either way you might like to know more about where you have landed.
You might be interested in my rsync backup solution called wombat that I’ve
been working on.
What is this site?
Over the years, I have relied on google and the blogs of others to solve technical issues. Sometimes this works quickly and easily and other times I end up following a longer path to find the solution. When I discover those hard-earned solutions, I sometimes get the feeling that I “owe” it to the community to write about it, so that the next person can have the “quick and easy” experience. Or, even more often, so that I can find the answer easily the next time when I forget the answer. That will be half of the content of this site, mostly in the “sysadmin” and “wombat” categories.
The other half is stuff I am working on, interested in, or just felt like writing about.
Who is the author?
My name is Poul Petersen.
I live in, and in fact was born in Corvallis Oregon. I went to OSU for about 8 years and managed to get way more education than I probably really needed; B.S. Physics, B.S. Mathematics, B.S. Engineering Physics, and a M.S. in Mathematics. Somewhere in those blurry years of whirlwind studying I married my junior high school sweetheart, Kara, whom I met in a Tae Kwon Do class.
I’ve been practicing Tae Kwon Do for over 20 years now and I actually teach a class thru the Oregon Pound school. My other interests also include amateur astronomy, which I don’t seem to have time for anymore, and of course computers.
In fact, computers are my daily work. During college I worked as a PC support tech for the EPA lab in Corvallis. I spent about 10 years there eventually becoming a UNIX administrator and then a Windows administrator when the EPA decided to migrate everything to Windows. Just when I was on the brink of insanity from administering Windows machines, I managed to land a job at Rogue Wave Software, and later at Strands. I am currently the CIO of BigML where we are doing awesome stuff trying to make Machine Learning easy.
As if being a sysadmin doesn’t limit my social life enough, I tend to spend most of my free time playing with computers as well. When I’m not playing tech support for family and friends, I tinker with my MythTV boxes, write perl programs, or tinker with web technologies.
What is “alleft”
It’s a play on words. If you check dictionary.com you’ll see that alright is a nonstandard form of “All Right”. Since I am mostly left handed, I find this just another example of how lefties are slighted, the implication being that things are ok when they are “all right”. So, I prefer “all left”.
Now the amazing thing is that I had been trying to come up with my own domain name for years. I eventually got to the point where I was running whois queries on ridiculous acronyms that were not even pronouncable. And they were all registered. Then one day I thought of “alleft.com” and to my surprise it was not registered! What are the odds?
I’ve tried googling “alleft” and most of the hits are related to the programming acronym for “Align Left”. Fitting.
