bengt-erik norum.

hi. i'm bengt. i live in duvall washington usa. i am a ham radio dork ↓, technologist ↓, beer geek ↓, dad, geocacher ↓, entrepreneur, and curious as hell.

not an image of me, but an AI representation based on 6 different photos.

technology is my spirit animal.

i've spent more than 25 years designing, deploying, and supporting infrastructure and software for small enterprise environments up through the largest cloud providers on the internet. i've managed tiny teams with no budget and orgs of several hundred people with hundreds of millions in annual capital investment.

mostly, i love computers. i spend much of my free time basically playing with i.t. lego bricks and teaching myself how to play with new ones.

i have a couple patents. one on securing lastmile dns, one on the application of bloom filters to iot scenarios, and one stuffing data into wifi management frames. thankfully the industry has provided far more elegant solutions for most of them.

after 18 years at microsoft, i joined oracle as vice president. i'm helping with their saas evolution and cloudification.

i helped a buddy reverse engineer the bootloader on a broadcom reference design switch manufactured for amazon. he's done a bunch of interesting stuff on these platforms and documents it at brokeaid.com (get it?)

aka.

verygeeky

beer

i really like beer.

i thought i've liked beer for most of my adult life. i drank beer through the 'more bitter than thou' hop wars of the late 2000's and early 2010's. i would keep an eye out for fancy waxed bottle stouts. i was a "beer person."

then a few years ago, when i first started hanging out with chani (my grrl) she challenged me with an ultimatum.

thankfully, it turns out the syrupy beige label lindemann's that'd convinced me i didn't like lambic wasn't what she had in mind... the cuvee rene pulled from the cabinet sealed the deal. incredible. what the fuck have i been drinking until now? geez, i thought i knew beer and this $7 375ml bottle changed my life?!

as with everything i dove in. literally a few days later and i'd received my "class 12" permit to serve beer in washington and passed the certified beer server – a few weeks later and we were in belgium.

a bit of hyperbole, but this destroyed beer for me, but as with anything (this.ignorance = 'bliss';) and i've been spoiled with exposure to great beer. the price of continued bliss? frequent trips to europe and a big lambic cellar.

i'm well into the second wave of disillusionment, which means i'll be obsessing over overly hyped beer releases soon. cheers.

"you better like lambic... or this probably isn't gonna work."
~ chani

ham radio

i am a licensed amateur radio extra. i've operated all over the world as k7add (s5, es5, es1, ea3, ct1, ea5, and ei1). i'm licensed in estonia as es5ad and es2ad. i operated on a "dxpedition" from the cook islands for 6 weeks as e51amf and e51add. it's a cool hobby.

i run flex software-defined radios and eventually plan on getting antennae up on my 100' tower. i'm loath to admit my fair-solar-weather activity, but i guess the returning solar cycle means i'll be qrv again soon?

QSL card from Cook Islands DXpedition — my "qth" (location) for the trip to the cook islands. i lived in that bungalow for a month. heaven.

geocaching

i started geocaching with my kids when they were young. they lost interest and i kept it.

i still find geocaches, but only actually log them when i'm visiting new states or countries.

just over 2500 finds between 2007 and 2018 and 13 hides, including a couple puzzles i was pretty proud of.

laser beams

i have an omtech polar 50W CO2 laser and a gweike G2 MAX 50W fiber laser in the Heavy Industries space. i use them to cut and engrave wood, acrylic, leather, metal, and other materials.

building things.

Zymurnaut Heavy Industries — a framework to support the artistic, commercial, and charitable aspirations of people I care about.