Tayledras:About
Contents
Welcome to Tayledras
History of LatheOfDreams...
LatheOfDreams.me and LatheOfDreams.com were created on October 20th, 2007, and hosted by me (Ken Foreman) in a number of iterations until December 15th, 2018. Over that decade, I worked at Comcast Network Engineering & Technical Operations, National Oceanic & Atmospheric Agency (NOAA), and now Sophos. As my career took me from Programming (1991 to 2001), Systems Administration and Systems Engineering (1998 to present), Development Operations (DevOps, 2006 to present), and Security (1991 to present), my experiences and expertise changed to reflect the government, corporate, and social environments I supported. When I was diagnosed with a Stage 4 Cancer (Mantle Cell Lymphoma) in January 2018, it really threw me a loop, and between my job changes and my health changes, I opted to let my webhosting and domains expire.
...to the modern-day Tayledras
With my pending hospitalization at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore for a bone marrow transplant in treatment of my Mantle Cell Lymphoma, I wanted to have a personal server and domain where I could advance my experience in DevOps and Security outside of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware servers I build as part of my corporate career. Tayledras would employ and implement all of the same practices (automation, consistency, monitoring, metrics, encryption-in-transport, encryption-at-rest, security) but reside on a personally-maintained set of servers.
Since I've owned Lathe Of Dreams since 2007, I opted to renew both the .me and .com domains, but redirect them to my new server and domain. At some later date, I may repurpose either so that they diverge from Tayledras.com
Meanings of Lathe Of Dreams and Tayledras
The Lathe of Dreams was inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin's novel, The Lathe of Heaven. Since my efforts are not so much divine (Heavenly) as they are imaginative (Dreaming), I opted for "Lathe of Dreams" in maintaining my web presence and building my online persona. I find it amusing, since Ursula K. Le Guin's "Lathe of Heaven" itself is a mistranslation of the writings of Chuang Tzu.
The concept of Tayledras comes from Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar Chronicles. Lackey's fictional people of the Tayledras remind me of Ursula K. LeGuin's society of the Kesh people depicted in Always Coming Home and other of Le Guin's works.
