Who is Dr.Shem?

Shem was born in Europe, raised in transit and educated across the globe — this intrepid traveller has been on the road for most of his breathing life.

It’s no wonder then, he feels at home shacking up against a rocky slope in Kyrgyzstan, frying up tasty grasshoppers in Burma or tracking a leopard across the Kalahari.

For over two decades, Shem has worked as a consultant over much of the (un)inhabited globe with a particular focus on developing and hazardous countries across Africa, Middle East and Asia.

His bag of hats has grown in proportion with his vintage and would more than likely be the envy of any de Bono scholar or polymath. Most recently, he added the freelance journalist and volunteer hats to his bag of tricks, which can only suggest that we’ll be hearing more of his adventures, but this time perhaps, with better grammar.

Home is where the heart is, or so they say, and over the years home has been (in alphabetical order): Australia, Botswana, Germany, Ireland, Malta, Mauritius, Namibia, Nigeria, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, Tanzania, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom and United States of America. Identity crisis, do we hear you say? His mother likes to avoid the topic altogether and simply calls him a citizen of the world.

Shem holds a MSc in Information Systems Security, MA in Journalism, BEng in Electronic Systems Engineering and BSc in Mathematics, all of which — not even combined — make him a doctor just yet; although it is a work in progress and his PhD dissertation is titled: “A Just-in-Time (JIT) and On-demand Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) Optimized for Public Cloud, SDN and NFV Environments”.

His day job consists of travel, packing, unpacking, talking, presenting, holding meetings, deciphering body language, riding a bicycle, arguing with accounts payable, reading, checking and writing mail, renewing passports, obtaining visas, getting kicked out of countries, sorting through a mountain of SIM cards, getting immunization shots, waiting at airports, picking up nasty parasites, dealing with immigration checks, charging his laptop(s) all the while answering to the title of Chief Security Architect & Researcher.

This blog, if you will, serves as a therapeutic outlet for much of the insanity rattling around inside his bald head.

Contact Me

You may send an an e-mail to [shem at drshem dot com] or follow me on Twitter @drshem.

PGP / GPG

If you’d prefer more secure communications, please use the public PGP key here or copy the block in the following section.

If you’re not a computer-security pro, you might be wondering: What is he talking about? Well, PGP encrypts your data — documents, emails and so forth. People who use PGP to communicate have “keys” that lock their data so it can be unlocked only by those they trust. Secure, or OTR (off the record), chat also involves encryption, making it difficult for your conversations to be intercepted.

You need to be running special email and IM programs for these technologies to work. As a start, you could check out the GnuPG Binary Releases page, which contains links to PGP/GPG software for most popular operating systems. For those running Windows I highly recommend Gpg4Win as it also integrates with Microsoft’s Outlook.

My 4096 bit PGP Public Key

Fingerprint: FD9C75D44CE7A621C4F69200356912DDAB581323
64-bit: 356912DDAB581323
curl/raw: keybase.io/drshem/key.asc

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Disclaimer

Any views or opinions expressed here are strictly my own. While I am a blogger who works with, or on behalf of, large clients, blogging is not my day job, but it is a passion. This is a personal blog. I am solely responsible for all content published here. Content published here is not read, sanctioned, endorsed, reviewed, nor approved by my clients or partners; and does not intend to represent nor reflect the views or opinions of said entities, its divisions or subsidiaries.