Ready For More Work

Help me spot new opportunities.

Infowar Netwar Irregulars Bulletin turned one year old this week and concurrent with that this is the one year anniversary of my getting my brain back thanks to Noopept. 2023 was my second annual round of treatment, thanks to some bloodwork I cut one prescription, and it was like someone flipped the lights back on.

The precedent setting 1st Amendment case in Texas that has dogged me since 2014 will be over in only six more weeks. The imminent end has put a real crimp in the other party doing things to bother me, and last week the alert I have on his name revealed he’s on the business end of another lawsuit from an extremely problematic plaintiff. I will likely never see a dime of the $480,000 I am owed, but my attorney can handle the collection work from here, and that other guy will keep him pinned down for the next couple years, based on what he’s done in the past.

Nationally it really looks like Harris/Walz are going to run away with it. That’s great for the country, but everybody I know is now intently focused on the election and the sort of stuff I do has been moved to the back burner.

I very much want to get back to what I had before I got sick - my own little engineering company, just me and my retired Air Force master sergeant administrator full time, with a handful of contractors receiving regular work. If I could grow more than that I’d love it, but basically I’m aiming for stability for me and my current admin, then matching problems to be solved with people who can do the work.

I’m ready to go, but I need some help locating opportunities. That’s where you guys come in …

Attention Conservation Notice:

This is just going to be a sort of brochure on what I actually do when I’m not being an internet super spy.

Past Work Scenarios:

Around the turn of the century I sold new and used telecommunications gear while I was busy earning my Cisco Certified Network & Design Professional ratings. That’s akin to getting a masters in the field. My practice was consultative in nature; I’m the engineer the sales guy can take along, and when I don’t have enough to do, like right now, I’ll go out and find stuff on my own.

Once I finished the Cisco certs I operated an international voice carrier, founded a wireless ISP, served as a telco core network designer for Metaswitch, and managed the network of a regional ISP with wireless, cable modem, and fiber to the home systems. I would happily slip back into a plant engineering role, or work for a startup offering hosting, VPN services, basically any sort of technical integration type work.

During that long period when I was ill I scored a $100k USDA innovation grant for renewable ammonia production, I built the Progressive Congress News system, and we finished in the top five for the 2011 Knight Foundation News Challenge. I spent some years contributing to the Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium, and I did a three year stint ghost writing a cryptocurrency column for Forbes. I wrote for House, Senate, and Gubernatorial races during the 2010 & 2012 election cycles. If there’s a startup that needs to communicate their vision to potential customers I’m good with the written portion of that, as one can see here by looking at the archives.

OK, I hope that gives you some sense of where I fit - architect of systems, communicator of the big plan, able to go and talk to those with complex needs in order to craft a solution.

Future Work Scenarios:

I’m maintaining Disinfodrome, a boutique Proxmox based cloud computing provider that’s used for sense-making with large volumes of documents. I have done civil and criminal casework in the past, I’d be delighted to find a detective agency or expert witness that needs this sort of service.

The internals of Disinfodrome are a maze of integration work. I tore apart Open Semantic Search to the point I can build and maintain it, even though the founder has abandoned the project. I’ve had Elasticsearch running in a horizontally scalable fashion in conjunction with ArangoDB and RabbitMQ. I’m currently trialing Nginx Proxy Manager and Traefik side by side to see which one I prefer. I’ve got a Dify.ai setup and I’m starting to build workflows with an eye on integrating them with the large document caches I curate. If there’s a small operation that needs someone who can handle a broad portfolio of integration problems, that might just be me.

I had no background in fertilizer production when I sought that USDA grant. I had never done a sense-making exercise or policy work when I built the Progressive Congress News platform. I had a little bit of reading knowledge on cryptocurrency when I started the Forbes column. So don’t pigeonhole me as a technology guy for a technology company - I could just as easily fit into a business in any industry that happens to need an IT guy who can do other stuff.

Hopefully that gives some idea of the range of duties I might be expected to take on.

Odd Jobs:

Here are some of the things I’ve done in the last couple years.

• Vision & planning for an innovative cryptocurrency play.

• Indexing and exploring FOIA data.

• Leak evaluation for journalism & research.

• Leak evaluation for victim organizations.

• Telecommunications provider technology refresh.

• Hosting provider heavy lifting during upgrades.

• Security consulting for individuals & small organizations.

• Individual harassment investigations.

• Lots and lots of technology product evaluation.

Most of this is conflict related - avoiding trouble, dealing with trouble when it happens, making sense of trouble others are having, or what tools are best when you’re headed for the dirty end of the playing field.

Conclusion:

I survived from 2007 to 2019, never imagining things would get better. Then, thanks to sheer stubbornness and good note taking, bit by bit they began to improve. What happened to me a year ago … there are no words. While I may be pushing sixty, I feel like the clock got reset to my late thirties, right before I got sick.

All I need to stand up completely is just some hints on where there might be openings.

You guys can PM me here or add Neal Rauhauser as a LinkedIn contact if you’ve got a hint for me. And thank you so much if you read all the way through this.