Just who is me, W. E. Reveal, to some, the kook ?

First, I am a Pentecostal evan­gel­i­cal Christian… but maybe it is just bet­ter to say I am a dis­ci­ple of Christ.

I have a cou­ple mas­ters degrees in the­ol­ogy, M.Div and Th.M, from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I am set in my basic core the­ol­ogy hav­ing at least 45 years to work it out so don’t work too hard in get­ting me to change although I am always inter­ested in ideas and con­cepts that are Biblically sound.

I also have been doing com­puter stuff since my junior year in high school, pro­gram­ing BASIC stuff on a ter­mi­nal in the hall­way out­side a math class­room. That was in 1973. I believe it was hooked up to a PDP-11 or older DEC but not sure exactly, it was a long time ago. My first com­puter was a Heathkit H-89 which I built from the kit and upon which I learned Assembly and C pro­gram­ming. I also began my long time data­base devel­op­ment career on that old box.

I have been pro­fes­sion­ally involved in com­put­ers since 1986, start­ing out part-time, then full-time in ser­vice and sup­port while I was a pas­tor in a small church in a north Chicago sub­urb. That is when I finally gave up my H-89 using CP/M and switched to Apple Macintosh which I still use (well, not the Mac Plus that I bought back then, a mod­ern one). Due to med­ical com­pli­ca­tions, I had to bow out of the min­istry and went full-time IT, becom­ing the IT man­ager for a com­pany in Waukegan, IL in 1991. There I not only man­aged the IT infra­struc­ture but also man­aged the devel­op­ment of an in-house appli­ca­tion based on a DBMS. I spent a lot of time in SQL and took time to learn C++ at dur­ing this time. I was very active in the Internet — com­mand line mostly — and helped develop the com­pany web­site in 1994 (although one of my assis­tants did most of the work).

In 1995, I founded, owned, man­aged, and oth­er­wise messed around my ISP (Internet Service Provider). For the first year it was just me and some vol­un­teers who helped with tech sup­port in exchange for Internet con­nec­tion. One of those guys ended up being my right hand man and worked for me until we sold the busi­ness. He and sev­eral other guys that worked for me now are uber sys­tem admins, pro­gram­mers, or oth­er­wise nifty cool IT geeks . My wife joined me full time in 1996 to help run the place as we were grow­ing rather rapidly.

As I said, I sold my ISP at the begin­ning of 2007. My wife took a job here in Omaha late 2007 where we moved. We have found a great church, Flatland Church and I have been doing IT con­sult­ing and web devel­op­ment out of my home.

My active com­puter skill set is as fol­lows ( yes, I have for­got­ten a lot that I won’t mention):

Hardware wise I build my own PCs and am very com­fort­able around any hard­ware, net­works, etc

For OSes; Apple OS X, Linux (Gentoo pref­ered for servers, Ubuntu for desk­tops), Windows, and Solaris as well as Cisco IOS

Apache, PHP, MySQL, and Postgresql are my main tools for web devel­op­ment on top of stan­dards based html, css, and JavaScript. I have also played with Ngnix for a web server and like it for very spe­cific things although in a vir­tual host­ing envi­ron­ment, I think I will stick with Apache.

Lasso, Perl, and Java I still retain but haven’t been using so would be rusty

I can look at C/C++ code with­out get­ting dizzy but I would take a long time to get back into the swing of actu­ally writ­ing code.

My main pro­duc­tion com­puter is a Macintosh. I have mul­ti­ple Linux servers, most at RackSpace Cloud (and upon which this site sits), and one under my sec­ond desk. They are run­ning Gentoo. The ones out on the net are my web server, mail server, and db server and yes, I installed and con­fig­ured all of them myself. I have a Windows 7 box upon which I use for com­pat­i­bil­ity test for web sites.

I trust you will find some­thing ben­e­fi­cial on this web­site and may God go with you.

Bill