Joe Gilmore
Aloha nui loa!
Thanks for stopping by and looking the site over. Who am I? That’s a good question. First, I am an adventurist. While I know people that grew up, went to college, and never really lived more than a couple of hundred miles from the place of their childhood at any given time (which, by the way, there is nothing really wrong with), I personally would feel lethally claustrophobic. That is why you can find me always moving forward… towards another large adventure. This last one brought me to the beautiful paradise of Hawaii. Here, I could finish out my life. Every weekend you will find me and my friends snorkeling and diving all over the islands taking hundreds of underwater pictures a weekend. Always something new, always something surprising. So much so that I do not believe that I will ever return to live outside of the 22nd parallels again. It was all good, but nowhere close to this. Every night at 5PM and every weekend, I am on vacation in the tropics! 
The key in life for me, is the belief that for every disappointment in my life, every promise not kept, every word someone’s broken, and every bad decision that I have ever made, does not give me the excuse to blame others for my situations in life, when I’ve been down. I believe strongly that anything bad that happens to me in life is a direct result of a decision that I made at some point. The “victim” mentality has never been, nor will ever be, a part of my character. The good stuff that happens to me (and there has been far more than my share!) is not mine and I’ll give that credit to God and others. 
I have lived my career with the same level enthusiasm and adventure! I’ve been a certified master network engineer since 1994 and in the industry since 1982. I am currently living in Hawaii and absolutely love it. Until moving to Hawaii, I contributed to Novell’s Netware and Linux groups at Brainshare and throughout the year through the forums. After being an owning partner in a fairly large service and support company in Oklahoma, I followed my wife’s (ex-now) career through medical school and residency and took network engineer jobs instead of IT management positions because of the temporary nature of my situation (moving here, moving there to support the wife’s medical residency). Well, my marital situation changed upon completion of her residency and I’m now drawing up new life goals and plans.
Hawaii has been a wonderful place to put those together. Technologically, I’ve continued to develop my Linux and infrastructure skills. In 2008, I was the Technology Director for one of the state’s best private schools which, has a long tradition of excellence in education. This was a very exciting opportunity to work with some very inspirational and talented faculty, administration, and students! It was an honor to be selected. In 2010, an opportunity came up to revisit my military roots. I am now serving as the Marine Corps Air/Ground Task Force Information Technology Support Center’s Regional Technical Lead for the Mid Pacific region! Currently, my office is at Camp Smith (which houses the joint Pacific Command), which has breathtaking views of Pearl and Honolulu! I also get to dine at the ‘O’ club again. 
Over the last 8 years, I’ve been pretty heavily involved in SAN (IBM and NetApp), VMWare, Windows, and Netware. To give you an idea, a former employer had 300 employees and 143 servers! No kidding, I’m guessing they had 200 by end of 2008! It’s nuts, but it was a great place to develop new techniques (i.e. what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger!).
Where am I headed from here? Another good question! God’s kind of been calling the shots there, in the past year or so and the path seems to be getting clearer and coming into focus. Since I have now moved back into senior technology management and regional support, I am able to design the organization’s future through designing its IT infrastructure, governance, and strategy, going forward. I’m in a pretty good place. I have also offered my off-hour services (as an outreach to the community) to I’olani Palace (the only official royal residence within the U.S.A.) and Miss Honolulu, 2008 (a few years back). Both of these are/were very worthy causes. Miss Honolulu’s platform just spoke to one!
Thanks again for stopping by! I do still consult occasionally and have been known to throw up a web site or two so, drop me a line (especially if you have NetWare)!!!
Cheers!
Joe