Five years ago I ported over the ten-year-old content of this page from my old blog, and it looks even sillier now than it did then, so here goes:

I'm "J". Just-the-letter, please, no "ay" or "." (except as necessary to work around Javascript-based form validators that insist that you must have a two or three-letter name; when I had a facebook account, I actually had to explicitly use "Jjusttheletter" as my first name).

As of early 2022, I have given up on the life of an expat in Socialist Californistan and returned to live in America, specifically Ohio, which I left in 1993 to work for Synopsys. After that, I spent 8 years as the lead service engineer for WebTV, a year or so as a build engineer at failed Perlman startup Moxi/Digeo, and 13 years as pretty much the entire IT department at Ooma.

I'm currently a service reliability engineer with Pure Storage, and quite pleased with the company and the people. Thanks to Covid, I've never actually been to my nominal office in Mountain View, so it was relatively easy to get approval to work remotely full-time.

I'm now living within 20 minutes of my parents for the first time since... 1987-ish, in a house that's more than twice the size of my CA home on a lot ten times the size, that cost less than the equity on the old one. And I have faster Internet for a lower price.

I don't do social media; LinkedIn doesn't count, no matter how hard they try to expand beyond the tiny useful core of connecting professional contacts.

I do do email, and it's not hard to figure out a valid address to reach me at. I also read the comments on my blog, which is pretty open and blessedly spam-free.

There are a number of other people named J/Jay Greely on the Internet, several of whom are Mac users who've mistakenly assumed that their iTools/.Mac/.Me/iCloud email address is "jgreely", so I sometimes get receipts for their purchases.

If you're ever wondering if a J Greely you see on some forum is me, in most cases I use the following picture as my avatar:

This is a stray cat I grew quite fond of after she started hanging out on my porch. She was skittish and wild, but tolerated me for the sake of a regular meal, and over time grew to accept occasional skritches. I was never able to get her to a vet, and one day she just vanished. I don't know if she died or got picked up by animal control, but while I'd like to think that she found someone she trusted enough to adopt her, I doubt it.