Photo by and courtesy of leahpeah.

Greg R. Perry

For some unfathomable reason, some of the people that come here and read stuff in my blog want to know more about me. I’m not quite sure what caught your interest, so I put this page up to try and cover some of the basics. You could always post a comment or send me an email if you’re curious about something in particular, but 99.9% of you won’t. Check back in - this page will probably grow (and occasionally shrink after I come to my senses.)

Here’s my first About Me page that I originally put up to make it easier for old friends and acquaintances to find me through search engines, but it’s mostly a listing of places, dates and organizations.

I’m an old geek, with the traditional interests in computers and science fiction, and am particularly interested in security issues. My politics are generally libertarian - I’m fiscally conservative, socially liberal, pro-privacy and anti-censorship. I vote in every election and occasionally write my representatives, try to stay current in local, national, and international news. I subscribe to the scientific method, with particular interests in astrophysics and paleoanthropology. My religious leanings could generously be described as skeptical, but I was raised Protestant and look favorably on Buddhist philosophy.

I was born in 1965 in Ferntree Gully, Victoria, Australia, the firstborn of Frank and Yvonne.

Angliss Hospital, Ferntree Gully

Ferntree Gully

My family emigrated to the United States in July, 1979, when I was fourteen. My father was a was (and still is) a corrosion engineer, a very specialized skill, and we were sponsored by Henkels & McCoy of Bluebell, Pennsylvania. We only intended to stay a few years and then go back to Australia, but we were made to feel so welcome by Joe and Marie Barnett, their family, and the Methodist Church in West Chester, plus with all the opportunities we found, that we never went back. My father had met Joe and Marie at a business conference in Sydney, and our families had corresponded for a while as pen pals.

I started getting interested in computers right away, and started writing programs even before I had a computer to try them out on. I got to try my first program, a password protection scheme, on an Apple II at school in the summer of 1980. Our first computer at home was a TI-49 that we plugged into the TV. When the IBM PC came out, I was pretty annoyed at having to learn a new version of DOS. I started college at the University of Delaware in 1983, where I was exposed to UNIX and dabbled in cracking and phreaking, and had my first personal computer - a TRS-80 Model 100, which I still have, with its 24K of memory and its 300 baud modem!

My first real job worth noting was in the summer after 1983 after I graduated from high school. My dad had, for the first time, leaned on me to get a job - I guess he had just figured out how much college was going to cost him. I caught a few stints as a temp worker, but that summer, my Dad’s company won a contract that they had bid so low they couldn’t afford to send anyone they had out to do the work. My Dad’s boss came in and said that they needed to find a math and science capable college or high school kid to hire to do the field testing, and I still have a strong mental image of my dad sticking his hand up saying “Oh! Oh! I know one!” I got a car, an expense account, a little training, and was sent out to do cathodic protection potential testing on a pair of pipelines that started in Georgia and went to Washington, DC.

University and I didn’t agree right way (I actually needed to work to learn, which was a shock.) I had picked chemical engineering for my major, which was a bad choice for my true interests, but I was too stubborn to change it. I dropped out and became an Infantryman in the US Army Reserves, spending three hellish months (fondly remembered) at Fort Benning. I was a smart, lazy geek who was looking for something you couldn’t find in books. I was 195 cm (6′5″) tall and weighed 70 kilos (155 lb), the last five just because I had started trying to work out before Basic. I hoped that it would teach me discipline. After initial training, I worked for a while, went back to school, dropped out again, working as a corrosion technician, and decided that the Army was so much fun I wanted to do it full time while I was still young enough to enjoy it.

I enlisted for a four year stint. I knew I wanted to go Airborne, but all the airborne infantry slots were full. They asked me if I would be willing to change jobs, so I ended up as a Combat Engineer. The video showing guys blowing things up was what sold me.

In the Army I had a great time. I blew up more than my fair share of things, met friends that I still stay in touch with, and got to do a lot of fun, exciting, and dangerous stuff. I learned to enjoy the fact that I could run a fast 10 km before breakfast, and could carry half my weight for weeks on end. I taught field work at West Point. I got a shot at my true military goal, joining Special Forces, but broke my foot early in school and got sent to Korea before I could go back. That bothered me for a long time, because when I got to the school I thought I had found a place where I truly fit - everything had seemed so natural to me. But I had only given myself a small window of opportunity to try out something that would have lead me to a completely different life than I had been expecting for myself. It will always be my “road not taken.”

I missed Panama. If Bush Senior had have waited just three weeks, I would have been there in Jungle School, and would have been deployed. I missed Desert Storm while I was in Korea. Damned luck! I went to Sapper Leader Course before it earned you a tab, and as an E-4, the lowest ranking guy in my class besides the medic, I graduated second in my class. The only guy who placed higher than me was the CO, and he beat me by the skin of his teeth.

After four years, all I had to do to make Staff Sergeant E-6 was reenlist, but it was a choice that would decide how I was going to spend the rest of my life, and I chose to get out and try to get back on my old track. I moved to San Diego, home of my blood brother (and Desert Storm vet), Juan Carlos Estrada. It took me months to readjust to civilian life, during which I missed the application window for UCSD, so I looked for a job - any job. I was in safety classes to apprentice as an electrician at the shipyards when I landed another corrosion tech job at double the pay. Once I was making a decent living, I bought a car, found a girlfriend (whom I later married) and never went back to school. I rediscovered computers. I met the girl that would become my wife online, at the old San Diego Connection BBS (SDC) in 1992.

So that’s how I got to be where I am now. I changed jobs a lot because my skills increased faster than I could get promoted, and now I’m called an engineer. I’ve been working corrosion for eighteen years. I’m currently certified by NACE International as a Cathodic Protection Specialist (#4419), and I formerly was a Certified Coating Inspector (#3746), but I didn’t renew it because I’m much more interested in CP. In 1998 I started working for Corrpro Companies in their San Diego office, where my skills were recognized and rewarded, and I was surrounded by a great group of people. We’ve weathered a lot of troubles, but my perspective on the outlook for the company has grown increasingly positive. And I’ve been learning everything I could about computers, because it’s probably my biggest interest outside of work.

In 2000 I was diagnosed with Stage III malignant melanoma, a deadly skin cancer, that had started to spread through my body. I seem to have defeated it, but it was an uncertain battle and it left a lot of scars on me, my family, and even my coworkers. I’ve written about some the details, but I tend to stick with the technical stuff. I got through it, and I’d like to leave it behind me, but I will always talk to you if you or someone close to you has been diagnosed with it. The first part, when I didn’t know what was going to happen, was definitely the scariest, and it got better as I learned more.

If you want to know more, it’s time to start reading my blog.