About

Greetings! My name is Jim Olding, and I am the proprietor of this bit of the internet you now find yourself at.

Hobbies

I’m something of a family historian, and enjoy researching genealogy. It also means I’m the person in the family who has to point out ‘No, there wasn’t a Native American marriage in the 1800s’ or ‘No, we aren’t related to such-and-such president.’ Family history can be interesting, even if it is usually unremarkable.

I also love the 8/16-bit era of gaming, and have a collection of consoles ranging from the Atari 2600 to the Xbox 360. I enjoy PC gaming as well.


Work History

I have been involved in the IT industry for over 20 years now. I started off in the late 90s as helpdesk for a local dialup ISP, where my first experience with Linux was someone sitting me in front of a terminal, pulling up ‘man vi’, and telling me to start reading. I still avoid vi to this day due to that trauma. I then moved on to corporate retail IT, which is just a fancy way of saying tech bench at a large electronics chain. Everyone should work retail for a year, you’ll find it helps you to be more sympathetic to those employees.

Afterwards, I took on a network specialist role at a nationwide trucking company. A lot of things change in over 10 years, as it started off as NT4/Exchange 5.5 and 56k frame relay links, and ended up a Win2k8/Exchange 2k7 with MPLS links to remote sites. I was fortunate enough to meet my wife here.

Now, I find myself working for a digital engagement company, working entirely in the cloud in an infrastructure & automation role.