About Me
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