Episode: 3716
Title: HPR3716: How I got in to Tech
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3716/hpr3716.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:35:56

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,716 from Monday the 31st of October 2022.
Today's show is entitled, How I Got Into Tech.
It is part of the series How I Got Into Tech.
It is hosted by Lurking Pryon and is about 9 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag. The summary is My Journey Into Technology.
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, where perhaps be, where you are in the world?
This is Lurking Pryon and I'm going to talk about how I got into tech.
My road into tech wasn't quite the road that you would have thought.
To be honest, when I was a kid, I loved taking things apart.
That was kind of my thing. If I got something, I wanted to know how it works.
So take it apart, I would figure out what all the inside pieces were, and I'd try and put them back together.
Sometimes I had extra parts that didn't quite work right.
Other times it actually went back together and worked maybe even better than it did before.
Hey, cool. I eventually got a computer.
The Atari console came out when I was a kid. Yes, the original one with the joystick and the paddle.
Yeah, I'm kind of old. But then I got an Atari 1800 XL.
Ooh, good old Atari. And we used to get magazines that would come.
And I would program little programs and save them on my floppy drives.
And it was pretty cool. But that kind of faded out.
And I went through high school. There weren't really any computer labs when I was going through high school.
That kind of stuff all came quite a bit later on.
So I got out of high school and I joined the Navy as a nuclear machinist mate.
So I went through nuclear power school. For those of you that don't know, nuclear power school is where they take a nuclear engineering degree
and they shove it down your throat in about a year and a half.
It's painful and brutal. And I don't recommend it to anyone.
At the time I went through it was rated the third hardest school in the country behind like Harvard Law and Harvard Med.
And I guess the only reason I wasn't ahead of that was because some of the classes were classified and couldn't be evaluated.
I don't know. All I know is they kept saying it gets better when you get to the fleet.
They lied. So I got out to the fleet and yeah, my job really sucked. I was a machinist mate.
So I worked on all of the big equipment in the engine room.
Well, the problem is is you can't work on the equipment when you're underway because all the equipment is operational.
And I worked on big steam powered equipment, big engines, big generators, stealing units to make fresh water from sea water.
It was all equipment. And when we pulled into port, we could shut down the equipment, which meant we got to do maintenance on the equipment.
So when everybody else was leaving the ship to go ashore in whatever foreign strange country we landed in, we were crawling in underneath the deck plates and doing maintenance.
So if we were four days in port, I'd be lucky to get one maybe one and a half days ashore.
It really wasn't all that fun. So after my eight years in the Navy, I said, you know what, I've had enough of this and I walked away.
Did a three year break in service, doing various things. The main thing that I was doing while I was out was something called vibration analysis.
Basically, this is where you take little accelerometers, kind of like what you would use for measuring earthquakes.
But what we would do is attach them to various pieces of equipment, big old pumps, generators, fans.
And we could identify things like being out of alignment. We could identify it being unbalanced. We could identify bearing failure before it happened.
We could tell somebody, hey, this is stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four bearing failure. And they could do predictive maintenance.
So they could go in and replace those bearings before they actually failed. Like one of my clients was Intel.
At Intel, they had their downtime scheduled to the minute. It was a lot like watching a NASCAR pick crew.
They would come in and they would all be assembled down there next to the equipment. For this one, they were going to go through and rip out of bearing.
And I was going to do an alignment of the shaft. So boom, the maintenance time hit and the boss was sitting there with a stopwatch.
And boom, they started ripping apart, pulled the bearing out through the new bearing in. Then it was me. I was up, did the alignment, made sure everything was good.
Start up and running and we had about a minute and a half before the maintenance window was over. It was crazy.
But that was the kind of thing that allowed them to be as productive as possible.
And they told me that whenever that plant was down, if it went down unexpectedly, they were losing about a million dollars a minute, which is kind of outrageous. And this was years ago.
So that was about as technical as I was getting at that point in time. I was using computers for writing up my reports. That was about it.
Well, then I decided to join the Air Force and I went into the Air Force as a tech controller, 3C2.
This was a career field where we took care of the communication between computers, whether it was across the network or across the world.
So we did local area networking, we did long haul, we did SATCOM radio, pretty much anything that transmitted data from one point to the other.
That was our job. And of course, my first assignment had nothing to do with the job that I was trained for. I got to do desktop support.
So I got to learn operating systems on the fly. I got to learn all kinds of programs on the fly.
And of course, data recovery databases, all kinds of fun stuff. Matter of fact, by the time I left my first duty station, no one even knew what my real career field was because I did nothing that resembled it.
The closest I got to my career field was plugging a patch cable into a patch panel in the switch rack. That was it. Never got the touch to switches or anything.
Fun times. My second assignment was in Alaska, where I got to work at tech control at Elmador Air Force Base in Anchorage.
And here I actually got to do my job. Long haul communications, we were dealing with long haul circuits running all around the world.
And there's a big hub in Anchorage, where everything rolls through. So we had quite a big center.
After I was there about a year, we ended up taking charge of the local area network. At that point in time, it was Marconi.
So I got to learn Marconi and how to do all of that. And then we did a refresh and they came through and ripped out all the Marconi and threw in Cisco.
So I got to learn Cisco. And this progressed. And as time started moving forward, security started becoming a part of the program.
We were in charge of the firewalls. So it was natural since we were the ones who were in charge of that stuff to be there taking care of it.
And as the network progressed and as the security of the network progressed, I just kind of moved along with that tide.
And I have rolled that tide pretty much the whole way.
So I've been involved in a whole bunch of different parts of what you would call security today, although back then, cybersecurity didn't exist.
So I did that for a few years. So I ended up doing my 20 years. So more than a few years. And then I retired from the Air Force.
After that, I went to go play in the civilitary. I've worked in banking. I've worked in finance, worked in government, DOD, done everything from pen testing to setting up and establishing security programs for organizations.
I've been the low man on the totem pole all the way up to the high man on the totem pole. And it's been great.
I love the new technology as it comes out. I jump into it. And man, that's like cool stuff. Really enjoy it.
I've got a bunch of certifications. They don't really matter. Certifications used to matter. I don't put a whole lot of stock in them today.
But with that being said, I'm studying for my VMware certified professional right now. So that's where the next career phase is taking me.
And that's how I got into tech. So I like hearing all of your guys' stories. Please keep sharing.
And hey, Hacker Public Radio. It's great. Love hearing you all. And that's all for me today. Have a good day. Bye!
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