Iffy is an old fart >50. When I was 13, (the christmas I got my first PC) I suffered a sporting injury whilst playing rugby, resulting in Spondylolisthesis with a 50% slip.
After finishing education I had several jobs including network engineering where I was part of a team. We worked in military facilities, research facilities, supermarkets, gas stations, Government offices and many others. I eventually got into tacking and dry lining for almost a decade before my back gave up.
I was then a taxi driver for a year, then a computer builder and tech support operative for a small local computer shop for a further year. This was in 2000, the year the "I love You" virus hit.
It simply had another piece of software (netmeeting) restart your PC 30 seconds after it connected to the internet. I was patching it for clients the same day it hit.
Due to my back issue I have rarely left the house since 2001, I have been sat at my PC learning all manor of subjects for the past couple of decades. I started with teaching myself PHP, MySQL etc and went on to build a virtual pet website with over 120,000 users, running on dedicated servers.This was the reason I later started making HTML5 games, giving the users many different small games to play within the virtual pet world I created.In 2003 I found Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and started playing it in my spare time. By 2007 I was one of the two admins running the most popular servers in Europe, B*D XP Save. I made skin packs and all kinds of stuff as well as performing server administration. In 2013 I discovered Bitcoin through an article the BBC published regarding Bitcoin consuming the same amount of electricity as Cypress, I read the Bitcoin white paper and started mining the same day until ~May 2017. The possibilities Bitcoin presented left me unable to sleep for the first 48 hours when I discovered it..Then I found Radix, or eMunie as it was in those days. Where to start? The late nights and near all nighters? Bouncing ideas around with Dan and then trying to break anything he made? .... Testing tokens with silly childish names was hilarious, I am sure Dan remembers passing YRMOM around the Genesis Crew all night, great fun was had by all ... Oh the good old days .. years. I even recall sending Dan 10 LTC late one night to cover pizza back in July 2013 as he just wasn't eating enough from all the work he was doing. I have always had 100% faith Dan would launch a game changing product, that is why I waited for XRD to be launched instead of accepting eXRD in 2020.
I am registered as a sole trader with my tax office, trading under the name Slightlyiffy. I am a legitimate entity that will be going through the KYC process for validator incentives from the Radix team.
I have been asked about providing more information regarding my validator. My main validator has 8 cores, 40Gig of RAM, triple replicated NVMe and a very good level of DDoS mitigation that I anticipate will be put to the test.
The cutting edge facilities the validator is in uses 100% renewable energy whilst using 40% less power than typical datacenters. I have chosen a small hosting company to manage the hardware to get the personal touch from support and help keep the network limited to exposure to huge providers such a AWS.
A few have suggested I have a community area so it is easy to contact me and keep up to date with validator news and events. Maybe even beta test the occasional new game for me. Here is my Discord:
You may have noticed I am helping other validator owners such as JoshC from Radixnode.io and IanMac of Radix Exchange. Ian and I go way back to be beginning of eMunie and we are good friends, having met in person several times over the years. I have essentially been Ian's tech support since 2013 on any and all technical matters. I am Ian and 4A1's, (a tech company with 30+ years of experience) tech reserve for their validator, for things like emergencies and holidays. Josh and I have been chatting for some time, he is a chef that dreams of silicon chips. I am happy to mentor him through and am here whenever he needs me, hopefully less and less as time passes and he gains even more confidence in his new found skills. He has promised to share his secret recipes with everyone in return. So don't forget to check out the second most anticipated launch of the year, following Radix, the Radix Eats series!! I also help Cobra with his validator. Such a busy guy but always makes time to chat crypto if you want someone to chat to that has been in the space for many years.
Finally, I have received questions about alerts and monitoring. I have a dedicated monitoring server keeping an eye on each server to make sure that the Radix software does not fail without me knowing about it. It does not take the server falling over to trigger my alerts as I have made them reasonably sensitive. When a failure is detected a loud alarm is sounded in my home waking me should I be sleeping to make sure the servers have the best up time possible. You may be curious of the alarm sound I am using, turn your volume up and give it a go, would it wake you? Now imagine it looped until you get to it.