Scott Klement admits to being a total computer geek. "There's something else to life besides technology?" he questions.

The machine has done right by him. Klement is a respected System i and RPG expert who grew up playing with IBM boxes. He has parlayed his skills into a multi-faceted career as a writer, editor, forum pro, and speaker, with a slew of awards attesting to his success. He also works full time as an IT professional at his family's sausage company in Milwaukee.

To cement his lifelong computer connection, Klement met his wife online at a time when dot-com dating was new, and his almost-3-year-old son thinks a great gift for Dad is a Nintendo Wii.

Meet Scott Klement, a technical editor extraordinaire for System iNEWS and the System iNetwork. It's not surprising that he finds little time to sleep. What he accomplishes when he's awake, though, amounts to a marvel.

Klement's father worked for IBM in the late 60s and early 70s and introduced his son to midrange systems and RPG, "The most elegant tool for writing business applications," Scott notes today. The young protégé also learned to program in a variety of other languages. As a hobby, he ran his own Bulletin Board System (BBS) and advised others about theirs for 12 years, maintaining the software and repairing and updating the hardware himself. Then the family business beckoned.

"My great-grandfather was an old-world sausage maker. His sons (my grandfather and his two brothers) went into the same trade, but instead of working for someone else, they decided to go into business for themselves," Klement recalls. "They bought a sausage company that wasn't doing very well and made it their own." It has grown steadily from five employees in 1956 to more than 450 in 2006.

Most folks in Wisconsin and nearby Midwestern states know all about the enterprise. People wearing oversized foam costumes depicting a bratwurst, a Polish sausage, an Italian sausage, a hot dog, and a chorizo promote Klement's Sausage Company by racing around the field at the bottom of the sixth inning at every home game of the Milwaukee Brewers baseball team. The menagerie of flavorful little wieners also livens Milwaukee Bucks and Minnesota Twins sporting events and appears at charity functions.

"I grew up as part of this family that was dedicated to making sausage, but I was more interested in computers than sausage, so I went into IT," Klement explains. In addition to programming on i5/OS, Windows, and FreeBSD (Unix), he handles the required hardware setup, configuration, repair, administration, networking, and help-desk needs for all the systems and software in the company.

Klement is the definition of "busy." Outside his job, he devotes time to public discussion forums on SystemiNetwork.com and Midrange.com. "I try to share as much knowledge as I can in hopes of improving the System i and RPG community. I feel that this is very important! If we all help each other, we all get better at our work and provide a better community for everyone." One fan writes, "Scott is one of the reasons the forums are the best." A top moderator, Klement offers more postings than any other pros.

He also produces the System iNetwork Programming Tips newsletter, writing approximately 120 [yes, 120] articles per year and editing 30 others. Klement also authors and tech-edits articles for System iNEWS and participates in a content committee that plans in-depth topic focuses. His goal is to make the magazine as valuable as possible to readers.

"Personally I like hands-on technical articles, the kind with information I can use in my daily work," Klement says. "A really good article should expand my horizons without being over my head. It shouldn't explain every minute detail (if I want that, I can read the code) but rather should clarify the concept behind the code. Once I understand the concept, I can look up the minutia in a reference manual when I need it," he adds.

"Whenever people learn something, it's always slow going at first. After awhile, they have a revelation (Eureka! It makes sense now!), and something clicks in their brain. What I strive for when I'm writing is to short-circuit that process, to lead the readers' minds so that they'll reach that 'eureka' moment quicker. To do that, I usually try to use analogies and hypothetical situations that will put the readers' minds in the right state to go along the path to discovery."

The package works. Klement has received several honors for his writing, and he also won a System i Innovation Award from IBM and COMMON for his website. A popular speaker on RPG-related topics, Klement's name appears on the marquee at COMMON as well as at the RPG and DB2 Summit and various user-group events. Despite his hectic schedule, he says he enjoys being a well-known personage in the System i community.

Perhaps his favorite recognition, however, comes at home, where he helps son Alex access various Sesame Street characters on the computer. "He also likes hitting random keys and closing my laptop while I'm trying to read something on the screen."

In honor of his "geekness," Klement loves to play video games on his computer, on his Sony PSP, and, of course, on the Nintendo Wii his son gave him last Father's Day. He enjoys "Sheepshead," a popular card game in the Milwaukee area, and role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons.

What's next for the sausage-maker's great-grandson? "Hopefully some sleep."

Vicki Hamende is a senior editor for System iNEWS. To read more of her profiles of System iNEWS tech editors, click here.