Mike Patton

I am not a singer. I thought this would be obvious from the rest of my pages, but enough people keep asking after getting a hit on this page that I thought I'd put it here at the top so maybe they'll see it. If you were looking for information about the singer who has the same name as me, perhaps you should try looking at a Faith No More page (I don't know anything about this band, just that someone pointed out to me that they have a singer with my name). You almost certainly got here via a search engine, let me give you a hint: try things that are likely to be only in the pages you want, a common name like mine (see below) is a bad choice, the group name (restricted to being together) would be a much better choice.

Don't Worry ... Be Happy

Warning: All of these pages sort of grew up over time. The organization is quite strained and it all needs to be globally reworked. If I ever get a round tuit of my very own, I might fix that...here's one that Wiktionary got:

This is a page of info about me, written by me (that's me, pictured up there at the very top). Others have pictures of me, too. Peter Löthberg and Ulla Sandberg have a page for me.

Mike is far too popular a name (here's a chart from the SSA showing that starting with 1954 [when I was born], "Michael" was the most common male baby name for most years to the end of the century). If you are a Mike, you've probably encountered a case of confusion with another Mike. One of the other people with the name Mike got the nickname "Wrong Mike" because of all the times he'd hit the confusion, and had a page collecting all of them, but the list became too long and hard to maintain, so he dropped that page. That's part of the reason I've used the nickname MAP (My initials) since the early 70's, but it's easy to miss hear Matt or Mack or others. It's hard to be unique.

Patton, too, is pretty common. I'm starting to collect some references.

Even "Mike Patton" (or "Michael Patton" although I prefer Mike) is too common. I've done searches that try and exclude me and while most of the results were to the singer in Faith No More, I've identified around a dozen clearly distinct individuals with the same name with references on the Web.

Who me? and What do I do?

I am an independent Internet Engineering Consultant. I work for Internet Service Providers and Corporate networks to provide advanced engineering services during periods of expansion. In this capacity I work with a lot of network operational engineering groups. In the past I've also worked for BBN and MIT, you can check out my resume for more details on any of this.

I have a very eclectic set of interests, many of which I've found references on the net.

Where am I? and Where do I come from?

I live in Whitingham, VT, USA. I have a lot of computers at home. I have an extensive network in my house (more later) because I like working in my home office.

I grew up in Rhode Island, the first state with it's own global USENET newsgroup. I was born in East Providence, but most of my memories are of Bristol where I lived from 1958-1973.

In 1973 I moved to Massachusetts to attend MIT and (except for one nine month stint, back with my parents) lived in the area, in many locations in and around Boston, until 2000. In fact, the straight line distance from from where I lived in Bristol to where I was in the Boston area is less than 50 miles, and for the first 46 years of my life I always lived within 5 miles of this line (but I travelled a lot...) Now, I've moved to Vermont where I'm slightly more than 100 miles from where I grew up.

I graduated (and am thus an Alumnus) in 1982 (with time off for "good" behavior? :-).

What are my interests?

I have a lot of personal interests, some are listed on a page where I catalogue WWW Resources for them.

How to reach me

The best way to reach me is by E-Mail.

etc.

What else should I put here?

I'm too modest to say more...
Well, more importantly just too busy with all the rest for now...

I guess a pointer to the home page I actually don't use much. But that was just for me to get quickly to the pages I click the most, I now have a window manager menu for that, even faster. My collection of web pointers is more complete (and more informative on what the pointers are and why they're there). I should mention Snow Paws' page.