Hello, I am Paul Stephen Stelzer, and this is my website. Excuse the alliteration, but I created the site to be my personal and professional portfolio and presence on the Internet. My hope is that to find out more about me, read my writings, or view my photography, Paul Stephen's Journal is the one definitive stop.
Professional Background
I am an information technology professional with over a quarter century of experience. I started my career as a programmer, though I have been programming all my life, starting as a child in the 1980s with LOGO and BASIC. I knew my career path when I learned Pascal in high school.
I earned my Bachelors of Science in Computer Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology in 1997 and a Masters of Business Administration from Northeastern Illinois University in 2002. I am also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute.
After graduating from IIT in '97 I immediately went to work for Commonwealth Edison (ComEd) based in Chicago. I started as a programmer and quickly was involved in Y2K efforts. In 2000, Exelon was formed from the merger of ComEd and Philadelphia-based PECO, and I joined Exelon Nuclear IT support and later corporate IT support. In the ensuring decades I partook in a variety of information technology roles, primarily for the work management and finance corporate areas, from application support to IT project management.
For the past several years I supported Exelon's corporate IT security systems. In February 2022, Exelon spun off its generation businesses into a new company, Constellation Energy, and I joined the Constellation IT corporate group supporting security. I currently help support the corporate security systems for Constellation as well as Exelon during their post-split transition period.
Personal Interests
If you peruse this website, you will quickly learn of my interest in astronomy. I have always been fond of outer space, but truly rekindled the interest when I built my 254mm Dobsonian in 2016. Since then I have written hundreds of blog posts on my astronomical adventures and pursuits in astrophotography, all of which are available for your reading here. I am guessing that as of 2021, about 90% of my articles are astronomy-related.
Beyond astronomy, I regularly practice on my guitars, a hobby I took up in my thirties. And I frequenty work on all of my computers, dividing attention among Windows, MacOS, and Ubuntu. My homemade Windows/Linux desktop gets most of that attention though, especially as I try to get more of my Windows applications to run under Wine in Ubuntu. Last but not least, I have always been an avid video gamer, and these days I play mostly on Steam.
I would be remiss if I did not also mention that I am an Eagle Scout. As my Scoutmaster had said, it will be on my resume the rest of my life, and I consider this website, in a way, to be a modern incarnation of that expression.
About this Website
Paul Stephen's Journal is my own personal, self-hosted website. I plan to write articles on how I set the whole apparatus up. You can browse all of my articles by categories at the home page. Every article allows for visitor comments. To understand all of the specifics about signing up and interracting with my website, please see the Welcome page.
I encourage everyone to read my Data & Privacy policy.
Paul Stephen's Journal is my own website and all comments and opinions here (except vistitors' comments on my posts/articles, which are their own) are mine and not affiliated with any organization.
Regards, and see you on the site!
- Paul Stephen