A thing or two about me

Firstly - I'm a confessed hacker. The white hat kind. Well, almost. A quarter of a century ago I did try to write a virus. It never left the lab, so don't start pointing fingers. I made a bet I could assemble one that would be so tiny it could hide in the memory of a modem card. Technically, I lost. I'm deeply interested in anything technology। I really am. One of the things I've been doing for a long while is home automation - I have this 12 years old site about X10 home automation. That's centuries in Internet years. But it still gets a quarter of a million hits per year. That led to my contributions to 'Smart Home Hacks' (amazon) At its peak, my house would look up the weather on the Internet, and base a weekly irrigation plan on it, and decide when to turn on the hot water heater or let the solar panel do its thing. All thanks to a very high WAF (wife acceptance factor). Lights would follow you turning on and off as you walk around the house. At the time I thought that a house was an awesomely cool gadget and I hacked and hacked at it. She drew the line when the house started greeting people with synthesized voice. That was one too many. And when GPS devices came out, I tinkered with a Garmin etrex, and have a technical site on everything you ever needed to know about the etrex GPS device. It too is fairly aged. That led to contributions to 'Hacking GPS' (amazon). Then there's mountain biking. Yup, I have a site about mountain biking too, though not nearly as developed. I'm an eccentric mountain biker, I think. I'd like to keep the bike simple, but the biking to extreme as much as I dare. I recently got back from a two week mountain biking trip to Armenia (youtube), where no mountain bikes have gone before, as far as we could tell. It was a blast, to say the least. All on a single-pivot, 2003 Santa Cruz superlight. I could go on with more of the above, but I think that's plenty to sample. Professionally, I naturally was attracted to computers, and I've begun at a time when the only way to communicate with one was via a deck of punched cards. I always wanted to get as close as possible to this most complex machine ever made - which has led me to a long career as a circuit design engineer at intel. Fourteen years worth of projects - from the first Pentium with multimedia extensions (1995), via the first laptop with wifi (centrino, 2003) and its successors. But after so many years, things started to dry up at intel, as far as I was concerned. I was ripe for change. Around 2006 I met this new kid on the intel block, Nissim Estrougo. He had a personality that was in so many respects diametrically opposed to most anyone I've met around intel's high-tech scene (me included). He was loud, walked around with beach sandals, and kept telling everyone what lousy jobs we all have. He never appeared to do any work, and made a point out of it. My first reaction was 'man - what a screw-up HR had'. Then, one day, over lunch, Nissim explained to me in great detail the philosophical intricacies of 'The Matrix'- my favorite movie of all times. Things changed very rapidly from that day on. Little did I know he and I would create Megawatt Transformers out of thin air, and two years later scribe on the fresh concrete at the entrance - 'There Is No Spoon'. Next post - maybe about how we fought for the creation of Megawatt. Maybe I'll get Nissim to write - though he moans every time he has to type anything longer than a full sentence.