Well, this is me. I live in beautiful Madison, Wisconsin. Previously I've lived in Milwaukee Wisconsin, Lafayette Indiana, and Waukesha Wisconsin.

I'm a grad student!

In Fall 2006, I became a full-time graduate student. I study Computer Networks in the Computer Sciences department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

I have a job!

I enjoy spending most of my days at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I work as a Research Assistant in Computer Sciences and also as a programmer/engineer in the Division of Information Technology (DoIT). I am a member of the Network Services group. I dabble in both network operations and network research, and plan to do so until members of both disciplines lose all respect for me. :^)

My areas of expertise (self-proclaimed, mind you) are passive Internet traffic measurements, multi-layer network systems troubleshooting, network software development, systems administration, and open systems programming in C, Korn shell, and perl.

In the earlier '90s, I was something of a gear-head, and wasted what was probably too much money on this little project.

• '89 Pontiac Trans-Am GTA

  • all white (like the '89 20th Anniversary Pontiac Trans-Am GTA)
  • tuned-port injection 5.7 liter (350 cu.i.) option with 700R4 automatic transmission
    (235bhp @ 4400, stock)
  • WS6 performance suspension.

• Modifications

  • Paxton SN92 Supercharger ('94)

    In '94 I installed an aftermarket centrifugal supercharger from Paxton Superchargers. A supercharger, or "blower", works very similar to a turbocharger but the impeller is belt-driven from the crankshaft rather than being driven by exhaust pressure. A supercharger doesn't suffer from "turbo lag" because its boost is a function of the RPMs that the crankshaft is turning, rather than requiring a significant amount of exhaust pressure. Similarly to a turbocharger, it forces more air into the intake to increase the amount of air/fuel mixture and therefore provides more power. Under the hood, the supercharger is all that shiny polished stuff up front that kinda looks like a big chrome hair dryer.

  • HPC-coated Headers/3" Y-pipe from from Arizona Speed & Marine ('96)
  • Flowmaster Force II 3" exhaust ('96)
  • Goodyear Eagle GSCs ('96)

• Technical Specifications

  Here's some info I found on the net:
  

  [The] Trans Am GTA had 2 powerteams available:
   
  5.0 Liter TPI - 225bhp @ 4400 (manual trans/dual exhaust)
  5.0 Liter TPI - 190bhp @ 4000 (automatic transmission)
   
  5.7 Liter TPI - 235bhp @ 4400
   
  The BASE GTA order setup consisted of either auto or manual 5.0TPI..
  For an additional $2500, the 5.7TPI was available as an extra option..
   
  FYI:   1989 GTA's had new deflected-disc valving for gas shocks and struts
         36mm front and 24mm rear antiroll bars were utilized
  
         1989 GTA's L98 were 0.2 - 0.8 faster than years previous to 1987
   
         1989 GTA's had the more-reliable Multec foul-resistant fuel injectors
   
         1989 was the year the "Notchback" option came into the GTA foray
   
  For investment purposes, the 20th Anniversary Convertible tops the list of
  Trans-Am's to have, followed by the 20th Anniversary GTA, 5.7L GTA, 5.0L GTA.
   
  Of the 1,550 Turbo Trans-Am's built for "Pacer" designation, T-tops were
  on 1,515 and 1,350 had leather camel interiors...
  JASON@UWPG02.UWINNIPEG.CA
  
  The 20th Anniversary Turbo Trans-Am GTA
  
  1989 is also the year that Pontiac produced the 20th
  Anniversary Turbo Trans-Am (powered by the Buick 3.8 liter V6.)
  

  

  My car looks nearly identical to the Pontiac Turbo Trans Am with the Turbo 6 motor, which was the '89 Indy 500 pace car, except that the turbo edition had Turbo & Indy 500 badges, and usually tan leather upholstery and T-tops (OK, that's alot of "excepts" but, really, they look very similar. I've read that there are only 35 '89 Turbo Trans-Ams without T-Tops. Really, that's the only Trans-Am I'd rather have). In the May '89 issue of Turbo & Hi-Tech Performance magazine, the turbo car ran a best of 0-60 in 4.98 seconds (which is faster than the '87 Buick GNX (5.5 sec) or the current LT1-powered Firebirds, Camaros, and Corvettes (~ 5.1 sec): "It was comical to see some of the comments about the turbo V6, which with ease is almost two seconds faster than its V8 counterparts."

  The Trans Am doesn't get out much these days.
  When I need to get around, I'm more likely to drive an old Chevy Blazer:

  

My most recent work system is an Apple Macintosh PowerBook G4. It's currently running Mac OS X, but if its X11 implementation keeps losing, it may be running GNU/Linux soon.

I also use a Dell Inspiron 8000 with an 850MHz Pentum III, 256 MB memory running Debian GNU/Linux. Here is some information about how I run my desktop.

My home boxen are:

• A dual Pentum III 450MHz Intel with 128 MB memory, running Debian GNU/Linux,
• An Amiga 2000 with a 25 Mhz 68040 and 7 MB memory. This box originally cost about $1400, and the 3rd party Fusion-Forty card (the first '040 card available for the Amiga) was a $1300 add-on.
• A 33 MHz 486 PC (~$600) with 16 MB memory running Debian GNU/Linux. I've been running Linux since '93. Back then it was Linux version .99 PL12 or PL13. (Prior to that I ran the Coherent operating system on this machine.)
• A Commodore 64. This was bought for $595 when it came out in '83.
• In the past I've had a Commodore 128 (for about $170), an Amiga 500 (for about $600), and a '286 PC (for $1000).

I was first introduced to computers in grade school... 8th grade, if I recall correctly. The school had a few Atari 400s and one 800 with cassette tape drives. Soon after, I harassed my parents for a computer of our own. I looked at a Kaypro (a portable CP/M machine), a Franklin Ace (an Apple II clone), and the new Commodore 64. My dad left it up to me, and I chose the 64. (In retrospect I probably chose it simply because it had color... The Kaypro was all text running Wordstar or some such app. The Franklin was a monochrome screen - I remember a game called Swashbuckler.) At the time one neighbor had an Atari 800, and another an Apple II.

In high school the 64 was very popular. Pirating was common amongst my friends, whom all had 64s. One sign-of-the-times was "flippies". Flippies were single sided floppy disks that you used a hole punch to make a notch in the other edge. This allowed you to put the disk in upside-down (spinning it backwards) and get double the capacity - which was important because you only got 170K on a single side in Commodore's venerable 1541 disk drive. (The 1540 was it's predecessor in the VIC-20 era.) The school had TRS-80 models IIIs (a grayish thing with monochrome 64-column screen and attached keyboard) and an Apple II lab. Programming-wise, all I knew was BASIC and TRS-DOS at the time. I was a major geek though, and would come in for school open-house events to show off the TRaSh-80s to visiting parents and family. I recall one friend having an IBM PCjr... he was constantly having to buy software and lamenting that the jr could do neither what the full-blown IBM PC could do (without lots of expen$ive add ons) nor what the 64s could.

The height of the Commodore 8-bit market was pretty much during the time I was in high school. They had the SFD-1001 (a floppy drive with ~1MB capacity), 3rd party hard drives, 512K memory expanders which did nothing but page in and out in much smaller chunks, and a 3rd party graphical OS called GEOS with WYSIWYG Wordprocessor called GEOWrite. I moved up to the Commodore 128 (which was basically a fast 64, with an 80-column screen, and, for some reason, an additional CPU... a Z80, which could run CP/M. Problem was, CP/M had already been dead for some time. (I booted CP/M once, and typed "pip". I think that was a "dir" command or some such.) With the 128 (which I got really cheap, ~$170 as a demo at the Target store) I got a double-sided 1571 floppy drive (~$230) and the Commodore 1702 monitor. This lasted into early college.

By college ('87) the Amiga 1000 had been out for a bit. It was amazing. I used to check it out at American TV & Appliance in Waukesha, WI, which at the time had tons of Amiga stuff. Unfortunately I couldn't afford it. Then came the 2nd generation of Amigas, the 500 and 2000. In January of '88, I managed to sell the 128 and 1571 for $400, and scrounged up enough to get a 500, with it's 512K and a built-in 3 1/2" floppy. It cost $585, and I subsequently got $130 back on a price guarantee after the price dropped. Soon I added another 512KB and battery-backed clock (A501, $170), and an external 1010 drive.

During my junior year (Feb. '90), I sold the 500 and upgraded to an Amiga 2000. For $1600 I bought the 2000, with 2 floppies and a PC bridgeboard, which was basically an XT on a card to run PC software. I added an 84MB Seagate ST-296N hard drive. Once I graduated and got a real job, I beefed it up with the 68040 and 7MB RAM that it has today.

• "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge
• "Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge
• "Extra Life" by David ?
• "Takedown" by Tsutomo Shimomura

• Howie Day
• Bad Religion
• Marques Bovre or Marques Bovre & the Evil Twins (a Madison band)
• They Might be Giants
• John the Conqueroo (a Milwaukee band)
• Ramones
• Queensryche

The beer styles of which I'm quite fond include Doppel Bock, Hefeweizen, British India Pale Ale and Bitter, and craft American Pale Ale. If you're interested in details about beer styles, you may find BeerAdvocate.com or Garrett Oliver's book The Brewmaster's Table useful.

This list hasn't been maintained in years. It's sorted in the order in which the bottles happened to have been scattered about my kitchen in the early '90s. A + indicates that I liked it, and a - indicates that I didn't. Neither indicates that I either am relatively indifferent or didn't recall.

There is some info about my skating escapades here.

In terms of the Myers-Briggs psychometric system, I'm either INTP or ENTP type; that is, between introverted and extroverted, intuitive, thinker, perceptive type. (In tests I come out INTP but just a hair more introverted than extroverted.)