Messmore.org

veni vidi didici

About Me

This Blog

You can find the purpose of this blog in my intro post. I won’t rehash it here.

info
Everything written here is my own opinion and not that of my employer.

Personal

Personally, I’m a husband and a father of 2 awesome girls. I’m a homebody and prefer to spend most of my time with these wonderful people.

I’m accepting the fact that I’m really an overeducated open minded redneck. I love thinking and learning, but I also just enjoy rural America. We leave the suburbs whenever we can for it.

The photo above is a hilltop outside Gordonsville, TN. I love the Carthage, TN area, so that will likely be a theme. The beautiful landscapes of the Cumberland plateau, a wealth of friendly local establishments, and there’s the Cumberland River, the Caney Fork, and Cordell Hull Resevoir all right there for a variety of fishing 😁.

My hobbies include the outdoors, hand woodworking, history, and music.

I play guitar very poorly and have sub hobbies around it. I build analog guitar effects, and I’m slowly building up my luthier skills. I do want to merge my woodworking and guitar loves and build electric guitars from scratch. One day.

Work

I’m a Technical Director at FedEx. I love my job and the amazing people I get to work with, but I won’t be talking about that here. I cover the area between datacenter/cloud infrastructure through application development. I look at packet captures and can get into Unix/Linux kernels. But I also write software, have worked in teams using a variety of Agile systems (from agile to “agile”), etc. I aslo have a philosophy/legal brain and deal with regulatory compliance and lawyers quite a bit.

So I spend a lot of time translating between the divisions within enterprise IT, making sure that the collective “we” are always improving. The best part of this to me is that I get to work in spontaneous “teams” of brilliant, kind people across fields and the world. I love learning from them, joking with them, and getting stuff done.

Family

Kim

My wife is a lawyer who works remotely for a firm in Carthage, TN. That is how we ended up with a connection there.

She’s the smartest person I know and amazingly supportive of me. She puts up with my wandering obsessions so well. We’ve been together in some form for over half of our lives. We unconsciously function as a team, not dividing responsibility by gender roles, but skillset and necessity. We love to just be together, even when we’re in a room doing separate things, and have since we were 18.

My oldest daughter has the active part of my interests. She loves the outdoors and can usually be found in her hammock out back relaxing or walking/scootering/biking around the neighborhood. She’s starting to get into the music I loved when I was her age, which is endlessly amusing to me. But I do enforce the “you can’t wear a band t-shirt for a band you don’t love” rule. As long as this is my house, love of music is a very serious topic.

My youngest daughter has the other side of my interests. She can sit and work with me on the tedious, fidgety things: Working on circuits, organizing resistors into bins, woodworking projects, etc. She loves legos like I always have, but also has her own interests in craft projects that are fascinating to me. She decided to learn piano and is extremely dilligent on it, something I was never good at.

All of my ladies are so different, special, and inspirational to me.