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About the IT Professional

About the IT Professional and Technologist (me)


I am a pas­sion­ate leader with 26+ years of mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary expe­ri­ence in the Tech­nol­o­gy sec­tor and my IT Pro­fes­sion­al career.

I am often described as a dri­ven pro­fes­sion­al empha­siz­ing per­pet­u­al pro­fes­sion­al devel­op­ment,  uncon­ven­tion­al think­ing, men­tor­ing and being visionary.

I’m high­ly adap­tive, strong­ly eth­i­cal and agile; my fast think­ing and abil­i­ty to see future trends and mit­i­gate risks are parts of my lead­er­ship style.

I have strong, soft skills and peo­ple skills, and while I demand a high lev­el of per­for­mance from my staff, I am always look­ing to earn their respect and loyalty.

While I am a strong pro­po­nent of Open Source Tech­nolo­gies in the Enter­prise, I am always look­ing for the best solu­tion to solve the issue, what­ev­er that may be.

Some quick facts:

  • 26 years of tech­nol­o­gy oper­a­tions, dis­as­ter recov­ery and infor­ma­tion secu­ri­ty experience
  • 15+ years in Senior Tech­nol­o­gy Leadership
  • Strong Risk Man­age­ment back­ground with a focus on dis­as­ter recovery
  • Mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary Tech­nol­o­gy Skillset (Oper­a­tions, Infor­ma­tion Secu­ri­ty, Data man­age­ment, Dis­as­ter Recov­ery, Archi­tec­tur­al Plan­ning, Sys­tem Inte­gra­tion, Strat­e­gy and Facilities)
  • Always look­ing to future trends bal­anc­ing and mit­i­gat­ing risks
  • Con­stant Pro­fes­sion­al Development
  • Glob­al Oper­a­tions expe­ri­ence, with a focus on glob­al Ecom­merce oper­a­tions and dis­as­ter recov­ery scenarios
  • Vision­ary
  • Pas­sion­ate
  • Uncon­ven­tion­al thinker
  • Strong Peo­ple / Strong, soft skills
  • Adap­tive / Agile
  • Eth­i­cal
  • Fast thinker and am at my best with tough challenges

A bit of history

I start­ed with sys­tems sup­port and moved on through Dis­as­ter Recov­ery Plan­ning, Risk Man­age­ment, DBA duties, Infor­ma­tion Secu­ri­ty, and eCom­merce; even­tu­al­ly enter­ing the Man­age­ment Track near­ly 15 years ago.

You can find out more about my career at my LinkedIn pro­file; how­ev­er, I have always been pas­sion­ate and dri­ven in computing.

I am of the gen­er­a­tion that grew up with the first micro­com­put­ers (such as the Apple II and the C64) and watched the cur­rent design desk­tops, lap­tops and servers evolve as each new mod­el was at the fore­front of the lat­est technology.

With­out dat­ing myself, I have seen the pro­gres­sion of com­put­ing from BASIC on a C64 to plan­e­tary-scale cloud sys­tems and AI-dri­ven technologies.

Out­side of my pro­fes­sion­al career in Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy, being a wit­ness and par­tak­ing in this pro­gres­sion of tech­nol­o­gy has been a fan­tas­tic fun ride.

For me, it is “what is pos­si­ble”, “the poten­tial for inno­va­tion,” and the “near-end­less ways” that old and new tech­nolo­gies con­tin­ue to evolve that keep me inter­est­ed.  I have worked for com­pa­nies that range from start-ups to 300,000+ peo­ple, tra­di­tion­al big oil com­pa­nies with mono­lith­ic ERP sys­tems to glob­al media/e‑commerce com­pa­nies and man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies look­ing to evolve with grid-style net­works and Enter­prise open-source deployments.

With new­er tech­nolo­gies such as the Rasp­ber­ry Pi, and the pow­er­ful open-source tech­nolo­gies that are at any­one’s fingertips…

I am con­fi­dent that we are enter­ing yet anoth­er gold­en age of tech­nol­o­gy, and I am hap­py to con­sid­er myself a Tech­nol­o­gist, not just an IT professional.


Orig­i­nal­ly Post­ed: Sep­tem­ber 20, 2021
Updat­ed: Novem­ber 1, 2022


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About the Astronomy

Look up, way up


To con­fine our atten­tion to ter­res­tri­al mat­ters would be to lim­it the human spirit.

- Stephen Hawking.

For the longest time (it seems like since the dawn of the uni­verse, no pun intend­ed), I have been high­ly inter­est­ed in Astron­o­my. I remem­ber being six years old and hav­ing my father read me the “Our Uni­verse” book from Nation­al Geo­graph­ic as a bed­time sto­ry and being com­plete­ly engaged in the subject.

For me, the cos­mos is a metaphor for a vast expanse of pos­si­bil­i­ties; it is a place where one can look up, won­der and dream.

Over the past 30 years, oth­er inter­ests, respon­si­bil­i­ties, and dai­ly events in life have kept me occu­pied from pur­su­ing Astron­o­my & Astropho­tog­ra­phy with zeal and passion.

With the recent events of the past two years (the pan­dem­ic) and being old­er, I have had time to re-ignite my inter­est in this hobby.

With many of my oth­er goals, hob­bies, pas­sions hav­ing been ful­filled; now seems to be an appro­pri­ate time to get back on the path of this journey.

The ded­i­cat­ed Astron­o­my sec­tion on the web­site is part of that jour­ney. In this area, I can doc­u­ment my attempts at Astropho­tog­ra­phy and post-write-ups about my expe­ri­ences with gear or events.

The Astron­o­my sec­tion is one of the newest sec­tions of this site, and I have grand goals for it, albeit it will take time (with a dash of luck, over the Decem­ber 2021- Feb 2022 timeframe.


Orig­i­nal­ly Post­ed: July 31, 2011
Updat­ed: Octo­ber 20, 2021


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About the Photography

About my journey with photography

The journey

Pho­tog­ra­phy has long since been my pas­sion (sec­ond only to my love for astron­o­my, the culi­nary arts, and clas­si­cal music). My pas­sion for trav­el and specif­i­cal­ly to des­ti­na­tions with spec­tac­u­lar land­scapes, has fur­ther fueled my jour­ney with the camera.

I remem­ber start­ing my pho­to­graph­ic jour­ney with my par­en­t’s Canon AE‑1 cam­era and a roll of cheap gener­ic depart­ment store film. If my mem­o­ry serves, I believe I had noth­ing more than a 50mm “paper­weight lens” and a dual-ring 80–200/f4 man­u­al focus no-name gener­ic lens. Those were the days…

That was eon’s ago regard­ing equip­ment, skill, qual­i­ty, and ambition.

My enthu­si­asm for this hob­by has only ampli­fied over the years and has been tak­ing me in the direc­tion of Fine Art Printmaking.

I con­tin­ue to enjoy the art behind image-mak­ing and always enjoy the jour­neys that I embark on to find the “next” large-for­mat print; how­ev­er, I focus more and more on the art and tech­niques behind mak­ing phys­i­cal prints.

The pho­tographs through­out the site cov­er a great deal of sub­ject mat­ter and have been select­ed from a long list of cap­tured images in var­i­ous film for­mats (35 mm, 6 × 7, dig­i­tal full-frame 35 mm), brands (Fuji, Kodak, Agfa) and a wide range of lens­es and cam­era gear.

These pho­tographs rep­re­sent a com­pendi­um of cap­tured images over the past 30 years, for the most part hav­ing been cap­tured using Canon 35 mm Manual/Autofocus and dig­i­tal equip­ment, Mamiya RB67, and most recent­ly Sony Alpha.

While the dig­i­tal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of my images locat­ed on the site is the eas­i­est method to show my work to the largest audi­ence, I pre­fer to dis­play my works in terms of Fine Art prints rang­ing from small Art Card style prints to images as large as 44 × 132 inch­es (~4 × 11 ft).

There is some­thing about see­ing your work in “tan­gi­ble for­mat” on fine lus­tre paper, fine art paper and can­vas that presents vast­ly dif­fer­ent­ly from an LCD screen.

My works on this site have been orga­nized into gal­leries and should be self-explanatory.

How­ev­er, spe­cial col­lec­tions, image sequences, exper­i­men­tal forms of pho­tog­ra­phy, and time-lapse work are scat­tered through­out the main gal­leries. These col­lec­tions and oth­er pho­to­graph­ic essays are my attempts to tell a sto­ry of an adven­ture, place, or subject.

Enjoy the images.

Cheers,
Rob Dabisza


Orig­i­nal­ly Post­ed: Sep­tem­ber 15, 2010
Updat­ed: Decem­ber 7, 2022


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About

About the website


Orig­i­nal­ly Post­ed: Sep­tem­ber 13, 2010
Updat­ed: Octo­ber 20, 2021

The beginning.

I cre­at­ed this web­site pri­mar­i­ly to dis­play my pho­to­graph­ic works and to pub­lish var­i­ous articles.

How­ev­er, over the years, it has evolved into a far broad­er pre­sen­ta­tion of my hobbies.

Dur­ing the near­ly 20+ year jour­ney, it has evolved into a col­lec­tion of opin­ion pieces, var­i­ous arti­cles on my many hob­bies and projects, ref­er­ence mate­ri­als, tuto­ri­als, astro­nom­i­cal obser­va­to­ry con­tent, a test­bed for my dif­fer­ent tech­nol­o­gy skill sets used in my career with­in Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy and ulti­mate­ly a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of my brand on the web.

The site has been offline for the past three years as I got tired of man­ag­ing it and felt that the con­tent was becom­ing stale, irrel­e­vant and ulti­mate­ly not worth the effort to maintain.

With the Pan­dem­ic and hav­ing ample time to focus on hob­bies and recharge my inter­ests, it felt the right time to bring the site back, albeit with a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent focus.

Renovations

In March of 2021, I decid­ed to rework the entire web­site and remove ancient arti­cles that are no longer valid in technology.

I am empha­siz­ing my pho­tog­ra­phy, my culi­nary jour­ney (and the book I am writ­ing on the sub­ject), and the many projects such as my cus­tom cut­ting boards and my retro arcade cabinet.

Addi­tion­al­ly, I am entire­ly revis­it­ing how I dis­play and sell my pho­tog­ra­phy as of Sept 2021.

A new, bold­er strat­e­gy is almost ready.

Photography, Travel, Cooking and Technology

This web­site is pri­mar­i­ly devot­ed to my pho­to­graph­ic arts and my oth­er hobbies.

There is an ever-increas­ing amount of arti­cles and posts focused on com­put­ing and the culi­nary arts.

Look­ing for infor­ma­tion on my career and who I am as a Tech­nol­o­gist ??? read more on the About the IT Pro­fes­sion­al page.

Moving forward

Liv­ing in Cal­gary, Alber­ta, Cana­da, has offered me the oppor­tu­ni­ty to cap­ture a great deal of out­door imagery on film.

Indeed, the prox­im­i­ty to the Rocky Moun­tains has influ­enced the sub­jects that I pre­fer to cover.

While the out­doors has been my pri­ma­ry influ­ence, I have also cov­ered a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of sports; hock­ey (the great Cana­di­an pas­time), speed skat­ing, snow & water ski­ing, to name a few.

I have also been priv­i­leged to trav­el the world, in turn pre­sent­ing me with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to sharp­en my land­scape, trav­el and street pho­tog­ra­phy.  New imagery was hard­er to obtain when the Pan­dem­ic hit, and trav­el effec­tive­ly came to a grind­ing halt.  That said, I have had a year to work on the vast exist­ing imagery in the vault; stay tuned for new posts through­out the fall and win­ter of 2021–2022.

Stay awhile and explore

I encour­age you to dis­cov­er the var­i­ous ele­ments of the web­site, espe­cial­ly the pho­to gal­leries and the tech­nol­o­gy arti­cles — the cui­sine por­tion of the site is under heavy re-devel­op­ment and is sched­uled to launch in late Nov 2021.

It con­tin­ues to expand with an ever-evolv­ing set of infor­ma­tion (pho­tos, arti­cles, opin­ion pieces, etc.). It acts as a jump­ing-off point to my oth­er web pres­ences — LinkedIn, Insta­gram, etc.

For those inter­est­ed in the imag­ing equip­ment used to pro­duce a pho­to­graph (and, where pos­si­ble, the set­tings of the equip­ment), you can find the infor­ma­tion for this on the detailed Exhi­bi­tion pages while view­ing each image.

I encour­age you to stay awhile, enjoy the site (espe­cial­ly the photographs).

Copyright

Please note that all con­tent con­tained with­in this site (graph­i­cal or infor­ma­tion­al) is under copy­right and is ©2001–2021 Rob Dabisza unless oth­er­wise noted.

Repro­duc­tion with­out per­mis­sion is strict­ly prohibited.

Enjoy the images, ref­er­ence mate­ri­als & tutorials.

Cheers,
Rob Dabisza


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