Most of this site is about work. This page is about the rest of me. The architecture reviews and reality checks come from someone who reads a lot, plays too many games, will eat pretty much anything, and has hiked, biked and ridden mopeds through a lot of countries.
On the move with MJ
My late wife MJ and I donated everything we owned and traveled the world together for over eight years, until COVID forced us to pause. Just our backpacks and each other. We lived in Vietnam, made Tokyo’s Shinjuku our favorite haunt, explored South Korea, found the best street vendors in Bangkok, chasing great food wherever we went. We called ourselves the RoamingPigs.
It was the most rewarding and meaningful time of my life.
We left in 2015. We hiked, explored on foot, biked, rode mopeds and drove our way through country after country. We backpacked Mexico from Tijuana to Bacalar, then all of Central America, Colombia and Croatia. We lived in Australia, Japan, South Korea, the UK, Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia.
Home was anywhere we stayed for more than a few days, because we made a point of making each place feel like ours. Home was wherever the other person was.
Over those years we spent time in more than twenty countries and territories outside the United States. Mexico is where we spent the most days, on and off from 2018 until 2025. Thailand, Vietnam and Colombia come next. We spent the spring and summer of 2020 in Colombia, then wintered in Croatia. A few moments I can date: hiking near Fujikawaguchiko in Japan in July 2017, and a scooter and a red helmet in Cozumel, Mexico in December 2019.
When COVID slowed the travel, we settled in Las Vegas, where I still live. I still travel. I just don’t live on the road any more.
I created The Mariajuanita Guzman Art Foundation in her memory, and I started RoamingPigs to help fund it. This is my tribute to her. The photographs, with where and when each was taken, are at ciscoandmj.com.
Games, the whole arc
I started on the classic text adventures: Adventure (Colossal Cave), the Zorks and The Hitchhiker’s Guide. Then came most of the old Sierra Online catalog and the Ultimas, years before Sierra became my first tech employer. I tested for them in 1992. Wolfenstein, Quake, Doom and GTA got the serious hours later. The last game I finished was Borderlands 2, and I’m slowly finding my way back in whenever time allows.
Before we left in 2015 I had a retro gaming collection that filled a room: pretty much every console ever made, with thousands of games and accessories. Owning the hardware is why I can talk about it first hand.
Books, and a first job in a library
My first job, in 1985, was Library Page at the San Diego Public Library. I was surrounded by books and I have always loved to read. At its peak my own library held more than 8,000 of them, alongside thousands of Blu-rays and DVDs, since digitized.
Fantasy and science fiction are home territory. I read every Conan the Barbarian book from every author who wrote one, the whole Wheel of Time, and Hugh Howey’s Silo trilogy.
Comics, manga and anime
The comics shelf ran from the classic Marvel and DC runs through Usagi Yojimbo and most of the Dark Horse catalog to The Boys and The Walking Dead. I collected manga, including stacks of Shonen Jump. I watched a lot of anime over the years, with One Piece, Naruto and all the Dragon Balls among the old favorites.
Old machines
I was programming at about age seven, in the late 1970s. The first machine I programmed was an Altair, through its front-panel switches. The first one I owned was a TRS-80, then came a Commodore 64 and 128, an Apple, and finally x86. In the 1980s I ran bulletin boards as a sysop. In the 1990s I ran a home server farm on two full T1 lines.
I run a real network again, with a home side and a separate office and lab: routers, a switch, a NAS, a rack server, mini-PCs and self-hosted services. And I built a working 1975 Altair 8800 that runs in your browser. You can find it at Logical Art.
Damn Good Pepper
Since 2014 I have co-owned Damn Good Pepper, which makes dry pepper blends. They are not hot sauces. Each blend is 100% crushed or powdered peppers with nothing added. There are two, Original and Special, made in small batches and hand-packed. The business is paused right now, and nothing is shipping.
The work side
If you came for the engineering, start with the career timeline, the AI systems work or the services.