TL:DR, more information about author of this blog.

My name is Patrick Allen as in the name of this Blog.

I promise that I am not a narcissist. I am middle aged white man (even though one of my parents is a quarter Native American.) I live in the middle of the middle of the United States. 😊 I am happily married and stepdad to a bright young man who married his high school sweetheart. My daughter-in-law is one of kind and I am so proud of them.

First and foremost, I’ve turned into a middle-class family man. Probably my best achievement so far, YOLO. I am so lucky to have them and they are my rock. It is for them that I am continuing to learn and push my boundaries.

This is my second blog and I’ve failed to juggle anonymity since my name is the domain name… Wow! I just looked up my old blog on Google Blogger. 😮

https://patrick3allen.blogspot.com

I cannot believe it is still up! Guess, I should let the cat out of the bag: #IWork4Dell. I sell Dell enterprise solutions with my focus on Ethernet and more recently InfiniBand technologies. At some point in the future when this blog’s content shows off technical skills and know how, I plan to link to social media.

Lastly, my Christian faith has become the third cornerstone to the proverbial pyramid that builds my life. Coincidently, it is the most complex and constantly changing aspect of my life. Let me lay out some more background before you judge first impressions. Through my late teens and into my mid-thirties I’ve battled with belief. I tried living the rock-n-roll lifestyle. Today there is still a part of me that is Atheist. My Occam’s razor reasoning is that we have the here and now and the afterlife is a fantasy. However, I understand that life is bigger than my understanding and have faith in something bigger than myself. This subject has turned into the longest paragraph and will continue it with another blog post.

Transparently, life happens, and this blog could get upstaged by other life events. Last year, I built a badass PC with 96G memory to run Hyper-V manager and some VMs. Plan was to blog about its progress. I was able to get a small virtual networking lab set up and run a few VMs, but most of my free time was spent playing Steam and GOG game libraries.

Wrapping up, I plan to primarily write about expanding my home lab environment. However, this is my personal blog and will be using this outlet as accountability for all of the most important personal projects I am currently working on.

Cheers to this year’s plan and I’ll leave you with an influential song that spoke to my soul.