What is patocarr.com?

It’s a personal site dedicated to sharing stories, events, trips and an assorted collection of computer knowledge and experiences.

Who are you?

My name is Patricio Carr. I’m more or less 45 years old, married with two beautiful offspring. I work in high technology as a consultant for several companies, specializing in high performance data acquisition computer boards as a digital design engineer. Before this, I worked for several companies in a wide range of technical duties, from management system software, web design, firmware developer, hardware verification engineer and printed circuit board designer.

Digital life

My computing life begun with a loaned Atari 800 and its BASIC programming language. Next came the Commodore-64 and C-128 where using a disk editor I would modify games’ strings so they’d read “Patocarr was here” when the game was run. Strangely, the next jump was Unix with its dBase where I wrote my first database programs. Years later DOS will arrive and with it, learned assembly and hijacking IRQs to make TSR programs. Also helped save years of data by writing low level drive access routines to recover from a hard drive crash.

Operating Systems

After the fruitful DOS days and peer to peer networking, I dispassionately started using Microsoft Windows from the 3.11 Windows For Workgroups, to the more stable Windows 7, passing through 95, 98, Me, Vista and XP. While I never got to the expert level, I consider myself a power-user. In all honesty though, always thought it was a necessary evil to get any work done with a computer. Then Linux came along. Oh what a geek’s playground! Over the last 15 years or so, I tried dozens of distributions, recently settling on RedHat (CentOS) for servers, Fedora, Ubuntu and Mint for desktops. In my hacking days, I compiled my own kernels and some bleeding edge packages (ie. Firefox). Also dabbled in scripting languages like Perl, Ruby, Python, Bash, Tcl/Tk and others.

Contact

You may email me to:

pato -at- patocarr.com

Please replace -at- for the @ symbol.