Just who is this guy?


So who am I?

Good question.

I'll get back with you when I have a good answer.

In the meantime, I can at least provide you with a few bits of possibly relevant biographical data.

I'm a graduate of Simon's Rock College of Bard, an all-early-admissions college of the liberal arts that is not responsible for my all-encompassing intellectual attitude problem, but which can at least claim partial responsibilty for providing me with some of the knowledge and wisdom that help occasionally back it up.

I'm presently a highly overpaid systems and networking consultant, working out of a way-too-cool organization called The Left Bank Operation. Have clue, will travel (for reasonable hourly rates).

Until recently, I worked for BBN Planet corporation, managing their Usenet News Service. It was fun, dazzling, and an incredible learning experience. I got to watch a 100-employee company-within-a-company turn into a huge-and-still-growing NSP juggernaut. I got to be news@bbnplanet.com (ah, the power), which was good, and I got to get paged every time a news server went down, which was not so good. Unfortunately, along the way, just about all of the people I knew and liked there left or were forced out, and the management consultants and marketing drones descended on the place like a biblical plague. So when Bob came to me with an offer that included doubling my salary and taking me off the pain of on-call duty, it was a tough but obvious choice.

Working for LeftBank requires that I live in Boston. I wish I could say that I liked it more. Moving to it seemed like a very good idea at the time, but I'm afraid that I've come more and more to agree with my friend Sylvan, when he said:

"Boston would be a great city, if it weren't for all the white people."

[Boston is physically very beautiful, and there's no lack of interesting things to do here, but I can't say that I like it in the same way that I liked Philadelphia when I lived there. Boston just has too many college students, too much Eurotrash, too many tourists, and not enough grungy bagel shops, cheesesteaks and seedy bars for my taste. Oh well.]

I think that's about all anyone needs to know for now.


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Nathan J. Mehl (memory@blank.org)