Welcome
to this, the tenth annual St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast,
where you, too, can steal the margarine. This personal web site has been
evolving since 1993, ever since Joe
Provo introduced me to the World Wide Web when I was a freshman at
WPI. Early interest in the Web spurred
interest in networking, unix (specifically Linux, lately
FreeBSD), etc. This led me to
starting my own leg of GweepNet with
the help of Jer Johnson and a few
other gweeps. GweepNet
has evolved into a fairly large, but not uncomfortably big, online
community. Yeah, that term is overused these days, but in this case it's
really true. Many gweeps spend time together both online and
offline. For me, this
isn't too surprising. I've had online friends who often became offline
friends since I got my first modem in 1985. I ran several BBS's from 1986
until 1989 or so and was very active in the Worcester area BBS scene. In
fact, this probably explains the sick desire to run a
limited public access
unix machine in this day and age. Some things you just don't grow out of.
however...
My true passion is hardware hacking. This has
been true for quite some time, dating back to science fair projects that I did in high
school and earlier. My friend Mike
and I in a lot of ways drove each other to hone our software and engineering
skills by competing in science fairs, writing BBS programs together, etc.
These days, many of my projects focus around audio. I've worked on sequencers, MIDI development boards, etc. One of my
more current projects is designing and manufacturing a
car MP3 player from scratch.
The audio
interest isn't without reason - I play bass and guitar sloppily and mess
around with electronic instruments. I've been in a few bands over the
years, samples of which you can hear on my mp3 page. My audio interest also extends to
the theatre, where I co-developed
an audio control system called
SMSurround for theatre
shows with Mike back in 1995.
I also wrote a handbook for technical theatre
while I was in school.
Groups like Alpha Psi Omega and
Lens and Lights fueled my technical
theatre and concert lighting and sound interests during my college years.
This interest led to the development of the successor of SMSurround,
DACS. Unfortunately, since I graduated
in the summer of 1997 I haven't been too involved with any of the groups at
WPI, but I have been keeping busy with many
engineering projects and my
music studio.
i am a full-time geek, but...
I've recently re-discovered bicycling, which is good because my once
ridiculously high metabolism has begun to slow. I'm an avid
mountain biker
about 9 months out of the year. I try to ride 4 times per week when my
schedule permits it. I used to ride a 2001 Gary Fisher Sugar 3 Disc with a
few modifications until this year. These days I'm on a hand-built 2004
Rocky Mountain ETSX-50, which I love dearly.
I also enjoy rock climbing, hiking,
and ultimate frisbee. I occasionally play
paintball,
which is both utterly barbaric and a completely fascinating trip into one's
psyche.
so that's what I do in my free time...
I spend quite a bit of the rest of my time at work. I'm an
embedded systems engineer
for my day job at a small engineering contract company.
I design hardware and write a lot of firmware for industrial and consumer
products with embedded microprocessors. You may be wondering what an
embedded system is. Don't worry, you're not alone. An embedded system is
pretty much anything that has a microprocessor (aka. CPU, computer) in it
when the purpose of that thing is not inherently to be a computer. Some
examples of common embedded systems: digital telephone answering machines,
intelligent thermostats, automobiles, electronic games, effects processors,
a lot of industrial and medical equipment, VCRs, DVD players, TVs, CD
players, GPS devices, digital cameras, etc., etc., etc. Getting the idea?
Embedded systems are practically everywhere these days. I find my
job quite rewarding because it allows me to use my background in electronics
and software in interesting and ever-changing applications. I'll take
embedded systems over straight PC applications programming any day of the
week!
and that's about it...
Gweep on.
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