I was born in Virginia (That's the East Coast of the US for our international readers) in 1969. I lived there until I was, oh, 2 or 3 (I barely remember Virginia). That's me above. When I was young it was easy for me to lose my balance. Now you need to buy me a few glasses of Lagavulin.
My locale (and local accents of the populace) switched from Virginia to New Hampshire. I lived in New Hampshire until I was 6. I also gained a baby brother, Greg (see above). After that I spent less than a year in Southwestern New York State.
I spent the rest of my formative (and not-so-formative) years in Waukesha, Wisconsin. I learned lots of things while in Wisconsin. I learned how to play drums, I learned that I was pretty good at math, computers, and science, I learned how to drive, and I learned that I needed to get out at some point. So after I graduated from Waukesha South High School in 1987, I headed to college... out of state.
Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Pictured above is my Scottish Terrier, and all-around pal, MacTavish. My family got him as a puppy in 1986. He's no longer with us, but it's because of him that I'm as big of a dog fan as I am.
I spent my undergraduate years at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, getting my Computer Science degree. I enjoyed Michigan a lot. I played in the Michigan Marching Band's drumline, and I pledged the Michigan Chapter of the Delta Chi Fraternity. During the summers, I worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and IBM. Between NASA and Michigan, I discovered the Internet. Between IBM and Michigan, I discovered I liked moving bits on the wire, and that I needed to learn more. I graduated Michigan in 1991.
Knowing that I'd have to go to grad school, I headed southwest to Tucson, Arizona and The University of Arizona's Computer Science Department. I worked really hard, played lots of volleyball and softball, spent 7 months at IBM's Research Triangle Park, North Carolina location, and in 1993 obtained my Master's degree.
As luck would have it, I found my first job by putting my resume on the misc.jobs.resumes USENET newsgroup. I was offered a chance to build next-generation Internet technology at the U. S. Naval Research Laboratory in their Network Security Section.
I learned as much at NRL as I did in grad. school. I got involved with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and met a whole bunch of really smart people. I also had a lot of fun in Washington, with friends I had met at previous places (like Michigan, Arizona, and IBM), as well as new friends. Despite all of that, I felt like I needed to get into a production environment, as well as escape some of the crushing bureaucracy associated with working for the government.
I had first met people from Sun (now Oracle) at various IETF meetings. When I decided to change jobs, I talked to them and others. Eventually I decided that Sun was a fun place to work, and I landed in the Solaris Internet Engineering group. A few reorgs later I ended up in the Solaris Security group, but that was okay as well. How good was Sun (especially my group)? I switched coasts w/o missing a beat. Wendy and I relocated to Massachusetts. I worked from Sun's, then Oracle's, Network Drive in Burlington campus for just shy of 10 years.
Parts of Oracle were driving away a lot of Sun folks, and I joined those departures at the very beginning of 2011. I first landed with Nexenta Systems, where I stepped out of my networking comfort zone and helped with platform and device-driver issues (as well as a little ZFS, naturally).
OmniTI subsequently offered me an opportunity to dive back into more general-purpose OS work (including the networking stack), and I took it. After three years of being the OmniOS project lead, the company turned over the project to the community. I then landed at Joyent, reunited with a portion of ex-Sun folks, and some newer-to-illumos people.
I'm now continuing work on SmartOS and Triton at MNX Solutions and their cloud.
That's Wendy, my wife. We met while I was living in Washington and working at NRL. She's wonderful, and you can find out more about her by clicking here.
Here's Masha, our first dog - half Lab and half Beagle. She was Wendy's dog originally, so any good behavior was all taught by Wendy. I inherited half of the dog responsibilities when we got married. Masha died at the end of 2008, after 14-and-a-half years. We all miss her very much.
In late 2009, we decided to find a Beagle. After visiting a great breeder we picked Maisie out of a litter. She's an energetic pup, loves to snuggle once her energy is drained, and we all love her a lot.
Okay, that's enough bandwidth for now!
rising falling at force ten
we twist the world and ride the wind
- Rush (lyric by Peart and Dubois)
