Ryan Nelson's Blog

ALL of this info was written about a decade ago, with a handful of lazy updates over the years. Circa 2015, we live in San Francisco, where I “build clouds” for living. We’re parents of an awesome kid, which is why I’ll have to update the rest of this later. More current info might be found at http://ryan.net

I (Ryan Nelson) live in the near-north suburbs of New York City (Westchester!) with my twin cats, my sexy foreign ~~girlfriend~~ ~~Fiancee~~ wife, and about 9 computers. By day, I am Director of Operations for Major League Baseball Advanced Media and I manage the Unix Systems Group from an office on Manhattan's west side, in the building where the Oreo cookie was invented in 1912.

A diehard Yankees fan, I love all things baseball. This makes my current job pretty enjoyable. I like Red Sox Baseball, it's just that I like losing Red Sox Baseball. Full Disclaimer: I'm originally from Iowa, so I got to pick a team when I moved here (Iowa Cubs and Cedar Rapids Kernels minor-league-ball are still in my heart)...

Prior to moving to NYC, I lived in Iowa City, Iowa, and worked there as a broadcast engineer building and maintaining radio stations for around 5 years after college at the University of Iowa school of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I helped rebuild the transmission facilities and studios at KRNA and KQCR (now KZIA) in Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, and built KRNA's first digital recording studios and first website in 1995. I was roadie, stage manager, and part-time bass guitar and horn player for the KRNA band "Jif and the Choosey Mothers." I was also General Manager and Chief Engineer at student-radio KRUI for a year or two until they noticed that I and several members of my management team hadn't bothered to register for classes.

My computers:
Road:

Apple Powerbook G4 667MHz 12'' laptop. I paid for this.
Work laptop: IBM A22 behemoth they gave me.

Home:

Acer 200Mhz Pentium1 desktop rescued from the junkpile, running FreeBSD, named "floss"... is my Xwindows Desktop
Acer 300Mhz Pentium1desktop also rescued from the junkpile, running NetBSD, named "wheezy", for it's noisy fan. It's the home fileserver, with it's awesome 10gig drive.
Sun Ultra1 workstation, named "aegis" 'cause that was it's name when i got it, it's my primary Sun Solaris8 machine. Heats the room well in the winter.
Dell Dimension thing i got online for like $700. Runs Windows XP, for when i need that. It's been off for about a month now.
Flame-throwing, ass kicking, dual-2Ghz-processor, 2GB-of-ram Power Macintosh with two flat-panel monitors (one 20.1", and one 24" for a grand total of 4.8 megapixels of screen real estate.) This machine makes working at home on weekends bearable. It's named "Joey", for Joey Ramone, who died in my neighborhood awhile before I bought it. I'd have named it "Joe Strummer", but he didn't die at a convenient time for me.

More to come on this bio soon.