Patrick
Padgett

Music, work & words

Producer · engineer · nerd · est. 1979

MUTED · press MUTE for the soundtrack

PADGETT HOME VIDEO PRESENTS

Patrick Padgett — a square film print with a '88 7 14 date stamp

About PatrickBe kind,
rewind.

The producer who tunes billing platforms by day and bass amps by night.

SP · 120 MIN · HI-FI STEREO · NOT RATED

I make systems that turn raw switch data into bills that are right. For fourteen years I was the top-tier expert on Sprint's billing mediation platforms, working the data off Nortel, Ericsson and Lucent gear. Later I ran infrastructure automation at Jabil and Raymond James: Kubernetes, Jenkins and a lot of Linux.

In 2000 I wrote corkscrew, a small C tool that tunnels SSH through HTTP proxies. It got a review in Linux Magazine, a mention in 2600: The Hacker's Quarterly (Vol. 19, Issue 2, Summer 2002) and its own Wikipedia article; it still ships in most distributions.

I play bass and produce records. The newest is Korupsi by Ledakan Pemuda, recorded in Jakarta in 2019 and finished in the US in 2025. I live in the Tampa Bay area.

FBI WARNING: unauthorized reproduction of this bio is punishable by a very stern look.

Work

File Edit Search Project Run Windows
WhoIsOn.p
unit WhoIsOn; {Hermes II external}
interface
  uses HermesTypes, ANSI;
  procedure Main (var u: UserRec);
implementation
  procedure Main (var u: UserRec);
  begin
    ClearScreen;
    SetColor(cyan);
    WriteLn('Callers online: ', NumOnline);
    if u.baud < 2400 then
      WriteLn('...patience.');
  end;
end.▌

It started with a Mac, a modem and a phone line the rest of the house wanted back.

  1. 1992Hermes II BBS — SysOp. One line, ANSI menus, message bases, and the first users I ever had.
  2. 1993THINK Pascal — externals for the board: my first real programs.
  3. 1994Perl and Linux — and production Linux ever since.
  4. 1995Advertisnet — System Administrator at a rural ISP selling dial-up to Lake of the Ozarks residents, and supporting its Macintosh clients.
  5. 2000corkscrew — SSH over HTTP proxies, in C. Linux Magazine, 2600 (Vol. 19 No. 2), Wikipedia, still in the distros.
  6. 2001–2015Sprint — Tier-3 SME, wireless & wireline billing mediation. Nortel, Ericsson, Lucent AMA/CDR. $2M saved, +250% throughput, −50% alarm time-to-resolution.
  7. 2015–2019Jabil, then Raymond James — infrastructure automation: Kubernetes, Jenkins, Ansible, Terraform, ELK.
  8. nowLooking for billing-mediation, telecom data or infrastructure-automation work — senior engineer or SME. Tampa Bay FL · remote, hybrid or contract. Full résumé on channel 3 →

Bedtime reading

The library book that never went back. Open it — the first pages are right there.

OctavitinThe Rules of Under

A bedtime book by Patrick Padgett
Read-aloud · ages 6–9

There are three rules to being under a bed, and Octavitin has never broken one. He is an eight‑armed under‑bed sock tidier with hair like a small quiet fire. Tonight, for the first time in a hundred years, somebody rings the bell.

Read the opening
Parker Pebble hangs off the edge of her bed with a flashlight; under it, green eight-armed Octavitin waves back beneath a puff of orange hair.

JUV PAD

Padgett, Patrick

Octavitin: The Rules of Under

Read-aloud · ages 6–9

PADGETT PUBLIC LIBRARYPlease return this card with the book

Read the openingThe book’s own site ↗

Booking records

The dot-matrix under the desk never stopped. It is still printing Ponder County, one booking a day — comic small-town fiction, written for grown-ups.

grime95!Small-town stories from Saturday, December 2, 1995

A serialized work of fiction that pretends to be the booking-records terminal of the Ponder County Sheriff’s Department on one very long Saturday. Every entry is a mugshot, a charge sheet and a short incident report about the person in the photograph. None of them exist. Ponder County does not exist. The nacho cart, sadly, does not exist.

One new booking is filed every day at 12:00 noon Eastern. The roll runs 313. Read them in order from 95-12-0001, or type a name, a charge or a place at FIND on the ledger.

The photographs are staged portraits of volunteers and props, styled to a 1995 Polaroid. The people in them are not the people in the stories. If you recognize a face, buy them a coffee and do not ask about the ferret.

Open the ledger ↗Follow by RSS

Music

KORUPSI Ledakan PemudaJKT 2019 → USA 2025 · 11 tracks

Eleven tracks of Indonesian protest music pushed through modern dubstep bass. I produced, mixed and played on it; the 30-second previews and the full record live on the music site.

▶ Play the recordLedakan Pemuda ↗

Bass player first. Producer because somebody had to be.

The coffee table

Every cover I was ever on, if you believe the coffee table. (You shouldn't — the covers are made up; the Linux Magazine and 2600 write-ups in the work log are real.) Pick one up.

Tap a cover to pick it up · tap again to put it down

Madballs

Nine gross-out rubber balls, one per obsession. Everything that was under the bed in 1988 and, honestly, still is.

  • Blow-Hard Bart — a gross-out rubber ball for Nintendo

    Blow-Hard BartNintendo

    NES → SNES. Blowing in the cartridge worked. Don't argue.

  • Road-Rash Rudy — a gross-out rubber ball for Thrasher

    Road-Rash RudyThrasher

    Skate mag, skate rock, Vision Street Wear high-tops.

  • Epic Eddie — a gross-out rubber ball for Faith No More

    Epic EddieFaith No More

    The Real Thing. Mike Patton doing whatever that was.

  • Jungle Jimmy — a gross-out rubber ball for Guns N' Roses

    Jungle JimmyGuns N' Roses

    Appetite. RIP Magazine on the floor next to it.

  • Neon Nate — a gross-out rubber ball for Synthwave

    Neon NateSynthwave

    Countach, Testarossa, neon grid to the horizon.

  • Wax-Pack Wally — a gross-out rubber ball for Garbage Pail Kids

    Wax-Pack WallyGarbage Pail Kids

    In the shoebox under the bed, sorted by grossness.

  • Slime-Time Sam — a gross-out rubber ball for Nickelodeon

    Slime-Time SamNickelodeon

    You Can't Do That on Television. "I don't know" — slime.

  • Falkor Fred — a gross-out rubber ball for Neverending Story

    Falkor FredNeverending Story

    Falkor. The Nothing. We don't talk about the horse.

  • Inconceivable Ike — a gross-out rubber ball for Princess Bride

    Inconceivable IkePrincess Bride

    As you wish. Have fun storming the castle.

OCTAVITIN · THE RULES OF UNDER · CHAPTER ONE

Chapter One: Three Rules

There are three rules to being under a bed, and Octavitin had never broken one.

Rule One: You are not there.

Rule Two: If you are there, you are socks.

Rule Three: Wait. Wait until they are properly asleep. Not pretend asleep. Not the kind of asleep where one ear is still pointed at the floor. Then, and only then, you may begin the tidying.

Because that is what Octavitin was for. He was an under-bed sock tidier. Somebody has to be.

He had practiced for a hundred years, in a small tidy room of his own a long way under everything. He had practiced being socks. Each of his eight arms had a job. Arm Eight's job was waving hello, and he had never once let it, because hello is the opposite of Rule One.

A child had to ring him in, with one particular small brass bell. And they had to ask.

Children said things about creatures under beds. They said they pinched toes. Octavitin had never so much as looked at a toe. Nobody had ever rung him in.

Children were enormous. They had torches.

Tonight, somebody rang.

Ting.

A whisper followed it: If you're down there -- you can come out.

He went.

He was simply, suddenly, under a bed in a small blue room, hanging from the slats, with the carpet a long way below him and a hundred years of practice going oh no, oh no, oh no in all eight arms at once.

Arm One grabbed the slats.

Arm Two went shhh.

Arm Seven, whose job was worrying, tied itself in a knot.

Arm Six, whose job was doing whatever it liked, reached straight down and rang the bell.

Ting.

The small brass bell sat on the carpet right beneath him, with a string running up from it over the edge of the mattress. Next to the bell lay a flashlight, switched off, pointing at exactly the place where a pile of socks might be.

Somebody had set a trap for him.

He reminded himself that he was a professional.

His hair -- a small quiet fire with no heat in it, a color he called orangle -- flared up so bright he had to clap two hands over it.

One of his other arms -- Six, naturally -- was waving.

And that’s only the beginning.

Explore the book ↗Print Parker’s Rules — free poster ↗