As long as we are doing introductions, I'm Steve Berl. I'm kind of new to wireless and mesh stuff, but I do have a lot of IP network experience, having worked at Cisco for 16 years. I sort of specialized there in ways to make deployment, configuration, and management easy and cheap.
I'm also getting into the RF side of things, doing a bit of amateur radio astronomy with RTL-SDR, and turns out I really like building antennas of various kinds, so if we want to whip up some high gain yagis or cantennas, I'm up for it.
I also live in Piedmont partway up the hill, and from my roof I have have line of site to all of Lake Merritt and a chunk of downtown Oakland, Emeryville, and into Berkeley. The roof has easy access, and it is easy to drop cables down from there into my basement/machineroom, so for testing those long point to point links...
-steve