Triceratops is a good choice. I’ve always thought of them as rhinos with even more of the cool bits.

Once upon a time I was planning on getting a degree, but i kept postponing it, and I now find myself in a position where I don’t really have the time anymore. Sure, retroactively speaking it would’ve probably made it easier to get here to begin with, but now that I’m here I don’t really need it. Besides, I fear that if I had gone the “normal” road, I would have ended up with a “normal” job, and I would’ve become disillusioned by the field as a whole.

And my abnormal career is being a field service tech for offshore petroleum surveys. While most of my job is done from home, I show up on the other side of the world now and then for maintenance and mobilization.

I mostly deal with HPC clusters and their networks. It pretty much boils down to large linux servers pooling their resources (mainly ridiculous amounts of storage) together via high speed network, as well as routing these servers together via VPN so a cluster on one ship can talk to a similar cluster on a different ship. The principles at play are fairly simple, they’re just scaled up. A LOT.