What’s with the name Rolande? Well, my first name is actually Scott. I picked up the nickname ‘Rolande’ (the ‘e’ is silent) years ago, while I was in College and a heavy IRC user. I was and still am a big fan of the Dark Tower series of books from Stephen King, whose lead character is named Roland Deschain, after the 1855 Robert Browning poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came“. I started using the handle originally in 1992 as a Unix system login which became my first real email address @bradley.edu. I was forced to add the trailing ‘e’ because someone already was using ‘roland’. When I would login to IRC from a Unix shell, it used my login ID as my default nickname. It just kind of stuck after that as an online handle for anything I did. In 1996 I decided to register my domain, thewaystation.com, after a location in the first book of the Dark Tower series.
As you might gather from the content you’ll find on my blog, I’m sort of a technology geek. I can be a geek about a lot of things. But, my area of specialty is most anything related to networking and application layer services like load balancing and proxies, as well as network security. You may also find things posted here related to pool water chemistry and equipment, as well as fish aquariums and possibly even Hockey. I have my Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert certification in Routing & Switching. I am currently a Technical Director of Solutions Architecture for Zscaler. I have an extensive amount of experience in the financial industry having held senior engineering and architecture positions for over 25 years at Epsilon, Capital One, JPMorganChase, and ABN AMRO, as well as having been a network architect for Salesforce.com and Siemens Building Technologies. I have worked very closely with BlueCoat Systems, acquired by Symantec and Broadcom, and formerly known as Cacheflow, for the past 20+ years having provided engineering input and feedback on product ideas and direction including the bridge pass-thru card, ProxyAV and CAS QA certification testing, canned threat detection policy, Webfilter and Webpulse enhancements, resetting the vision and direction for the Director/Management Center platform and proxy management, Web Security Service (Threatpulse) enhancements, OWASP Top 10 policy development and penetration testing for application web firewall product enhancements, LDAP, Siteminder, and SAML authentication improvements, and uncovering a policy compliance issue buried in the policy engine behavior related to apparent data type inspection, response based rulesets, and recommending a policy feature to enforce compliant order of operations.
I was born in Paris, France and spent 4 years living in Geneva, Switzerland. I grew up in central Illinois, where I graduated from Bradley University. I also spent a number of months in Hong Kong, when my parents were living there. I’ve lived in Chicago, Columbus, Ohio, and am currently in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex. I am married to my wife, Shelly, and between the 2 of us we have 6 children.
Rolande's Ramblings 