Currently, I'm an Open Sourcerer who works on Linux at the IBM Linux Technology Center (offsite) in Beaverton, Oregon. I finally graduated from the Computer Science (offsite) department at the University of California, San Diego (offsite). Back then, my specialty was operating systems and high performance computing systems (HPCS). I also pursued (and received) a minor in Management Science (offsite) because I felt like it. See my Résumé.
Before UCSD, I went to Menlo School (offsite) in Atherton, California. Prior to that, I went to The Harker School (offsite) in San Jose, and before _that_ I went to West Valley Elementary (offsite) in Sunnyvale.
Computers. Nowhere is this more apparent than our apartment; we have a motley collection of really old Macintoshes, a couple of VAXstations, bits and pieces of at least three or four PCs, and several Sun workstations lying around. Of course, we all have nice fast Athlons too, for when we need to do some real work...
I like to write computer programs too. When I was in high school, free time was very plentiful, and the programs flowed out of my hands into the computer. I have had far less free time in college (pretty much none nowadays), so the pace has slowed down quite a bit. However, three programs stand out in my mind as some of the more impressive things I've done. The first was finished while I was at Menlo; the others were done in college.
The Periodic Table program shows an interactive Periodic Table of the elements; you can see various graphs of atomic data, as well as have the program render electron shells in 3D!
A few years ago, Woodley (offsite) wrote a C-based random sentence generator. I later ported the program to Java, renamed it jrand and improved the grammar somewhat. Unfortunately, human languages such as English tend to be contextual grammars, and so the sentences that this program outputs tend to be somewhat stilted. Oh well--it's pretty good for a program that began as a joke!
More recently, I've been working on a collection of programs known as the jGrid Cluster Software. jGrid performs all the coordination work to support efficient parallel computation--job submission, scheduling, execution, and some degree of message passing. Thus far, I've used it to plot Mandelbrot sets and determine primality via brute-force methods. Stay tuned--I will eventually write more interesting parallel programs.
Enough about computers. Years ago, I wore a lot of different hats--journalist, newspaper publisher, bioengineer, and amateur musician. Then college came along, and I've had to cut nearly all of them to find time for my studies. Now, I'm just an audiophile. Generally, I listen to some forms of classical music (medieval and 19th century), jazz, Oldies, and the occasional techno beat. I used to sing with my high school choir, but in truth I simply haven't felt like picking that up any more. Oh well. Maddy says I should...we'll see. School is stressful, and I can't sing under pressure.
Other than, I'm a UCSD Engineering Nerd who tries to maintain a stable social life. Not much headway has been made in this field, but I'm slowly getting there. I expect that this part of me will ramp up once school's over. Not having to compete with people who don't need or don't want a social life is not particularly fun.
Oh yeah, I like intellectually stimulating people. Or people with completely different interests.
If you fit any of the above, leave now. Though, if you're on a speaking basis with me, you're probably _not_ any of the above. With all seriousness, I will talk to most people.
My PGP key (as of 2004-12-24):
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download it here (offsite).
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