![[A very old picture of me]](pics/woj2.gif)
A more recent picture of me shows the short-haird, bearded incarnation.
Much of this information is spectacularly out-of-date. I occasionally add some more current information, but I'm not interested in doing a comprehensive update and cleanup anytime soon. Those who've known me since before CCS ran a web server may recognise which portions are purely historical.
This can vary quite a bit!
I was married on 13th November, 1999, in Goring-by-Sea, England. More about that will most likely be forthcoming, eventually. Suffice it to say that I'm very happy.
I have an HTML version of an outdated version of my resume.
I work at MITRE in Bedford, Massachusetts, where I spent some time as a co-op in 1995/1996. I'm doing various Information Security work there. Most of my time is spent working on the Open Vulnerability and Assessment Language (OVAL) project. I'm the Moderator of the OVAL Board, among other things.
I sing from The Sacred Harp about as often as I can, generally at least once a week. There's the montly third-Sunday sing in Brattleboro, the first-Sunday sing in Amherst, and the Northampton sing, every Tuesday night in the Hellen Hills Hills chapel on the campus of Smith College. Come sing sometime!
I spent much of 1998 and 1999 singing and touring Europe and the US with Northern Harmony. Northern Harmony is an unusual group, featuring strong, mostly unaccompanied singing from a variety of traditions around the world. I also have worked extensively with Village Harmony, a youth ensemble founded by Larry Gordon, Northern Harmony's director. In the summer of 1999, I worked again as a co-director at two sessions of Village Harmony Camp, the wonderful three-week touring camp for teenage singers.
In between singing tours, I was taking short-term IT work, mostly network administration and design. For January and February of 1999, I was back at CCS, this time helping build a Beowulf-style cluster of machines as part of an NSF grant. I was in charge of network design, net product evaluation and acquisition, and network construction of a system specified as 32 nodes connected via OC3 ATM and FastEthernet. In the term of my two-month contract, I managed to complete the provisional network design, evaluate networking products from various vendors, and purchase equipment from Cisco Systems. Oh, and I even wrote a little bit of documentation.
Unfortunately, my contract was up (and I was off on another singing tour) before I could actually build the thing. Too bad; I was hoping to get to play with all the cool toys. Fortunately, Daniel Rinehart got the job of putting the thing together, physically and all of the systems wrangling necessary to get it working. Dan's without a doubt the most clued and productive guy to come through the CCS Crew for a very long time. He's put together some information about the cluster.
I was the Network Administrator for the College of Computer Science here at Northeastern University, from September 1996 through September 1997. I left my full-time position here because of an opportunity to go on an extended singing tour with Northern Harmony, a shifting collaboration of teenage and adult singers led by Larry Gordon. When I resigned as Net Admin for CCS, I also put on long-term hold my quest for a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. Music has become more of a priority in my life than CS (well, except when it comes to getting the bills paid!), and my motivation to get the degree was pretty much gone. So I'm left with 76 out of 184 credits, with a GPA of 3.187. Guess it could be worse.
Between August 1995 and the summer of 1996, I did a couple of stints as a full time as a Tech Aide at MITRE and then its now-defunct commercial spin-off, Concept Five Technologies, in Information Security. I'd tell you more about my work from the period, but then I'd have to kill you.
Seriously, some of the projects I worked on at MTIRE and C5 involved internet firewall design and construction, and I also did some work on a low-level TCP/IP library in C. The most aggravating thing I did was to go through every CERT advisory to see which applied to SunOS 4.1.4, and cross-reference CERT advisories and SunOS patches in a nice little report (and I didn't even get paid for that project!).
...is work on these pages very much. As you may have guessed by now, I don't have a tremendous talent for graphic design, and I tend to ramble on a bit when I start writing something. I work on my web pages in spurts, typically, which seem to come rarely these days.
I guess the upshot of this is something of a disclaimer: like a lot of stuff on the web these days, especially (it seems) personal information, a lot of what you'll find here is quite likely out of date to some degree. Some of it badly, in fact. Oh well. :)
I tend to spend far too much time in front of a computer screen. That reached a peak when I was a member of CCS's Crew, a group of volunteer undergrads working to help keep the College's computers running, and when I was a member of the Experimental Systems Group, a group of professionals working to keep the College's computers running. Now that I have a full-time job as a computer geek again, I'm spending lots of time at the keyboard once more, but thanks to having an outside life, not as much as I once did.
Web pages aren't my only creative outlet. I've written some prose, and some stuff which (for lack of a better term) I refer to as poetry. I've also been slowly collecting, over the years, quotes to go in my .plan. Don't feel you necessarily should understand all of them.
I do a lot of things with computers that probably would only be interesting to other computer nerds:
...is insulin. I was diagnosed with Type I (or insulin-dependant, or juvenile-onset) diabetes on December 27th, 1994. This was something of a shock, since there isn't any history of Type I diabetes in my family.
The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) has an excellent overview of diabetes online. The misc.health.diabetes FAQ and related documents are also excellent, with information which is both broader-based and in more depth. The Canadian Diabetes Association has an interesting diabetes timeline as well.
