Disclaimer: at this point (October 13, 2009), my Andrew account is set to go away in a little less than a month. As a result, it might be a better idea to look at my Computer Club Webspace. Of course, I may never put anything there (it took me more than five years to put anything resembling a webpage here!), but if I do, it will probably be more up to date than this page.
I'm originally from... Maine, although that doesn't really count since I haven't lived there in at least twenty years. More recently, I hail from Fairfax, Virginia (i.e., I lived there the six years before I went to college), where I had the privilege of attending Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.
After I graduated high school, I entered Carnegie Mellon University as a freshman in the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Being unchallenged by my first year in the engineering school, I transferred into the School of Computer Science as a sophomore. On May 18, 2008, I graduated with University and College Honors and received my B.S. in Computer Science. Interested in computer systems research, I continued my studies at Carnegie Mellon in the SCS Fifth Year Master's Program, with Priya Narasimhan as my adviser. I defended my master's thesis on September 3 and then submitted my thesis on September 11, 2009.
On September 21, 2009, I started working at NetApp's Pittsburgh office. Hello, real world!
I played tuba in the Carnegie Mellon Kiltie Band and All University Orchestra, serving as the Vice President of AUO during the 2007–2008 school year. Additionally, I joined the East Winds Symphonic Band in the summer of 2007. These musical activities meant a lot to me, and were often a wonderful reprieve from academic stresses. Sadly, I am currently experiencing what seems to be embouchure dystonia, and it's not clear that I'll be able to continue playing tuba in the future. Which is rather jarring after having played the instrument for 12 years...
I have been an active member of the Carnegie Mellon Computer Club since I arrived on campus. I was the club president in the 2005–2006 and 2007–2008 school years, and the secretary in the 2006–2007 and 2008–2009 school years. Some projects I've worked on include: AWstats for the club webservers, the mod_rewrite rules that make The Contributed Webserver tick, the club qmail installation, servers, a script for keeping track of virtual machines, and Amiga retro-computing. I always enjoyed the club events (especially demo night!), and getting the chance to spend time with people that still think computers are cool (rather than mundane)!
There are also some organizations that I wasn't as active in. I met a lot of interesting people in the KGB my first two years in school. However, during my junior year, I concluded that meetings had become much less interesting, and started skipping them in deference to fetching my tuba from my off-campus apartment so I could attend Kiltie Band rehearsals. The spring of my freshman year, a friend convinced me to get a HAM radio license (my callsign is KI4JJM) and join W3VC, the amateur radio club. I worked the buggy safety net on some early mornings, but my involvement in the radio club fizzled out the last couple of years, since I just didn't have enough time. I started attending Astronomy Club meetings in the spring of 2007. This was mostly based on the fact I had some friends in the group, combined with a slight curiosity about astronomy. I continued going to meetings, mostly because they provided a good opportunity to socialize.
Here is a collection of links to the various things that live in my Andrew webspace. I'm one of those strange people that believes a website is not improved if the improvement causes prior content to disappear. Thus, my prior content will not disappear (well, at least until my home directory gets deleted, and you can't even be reading this text). In fact, I'll even be nice enough to link to most of it.
Here are various diagnostic tools, pages, and scripts I wrote for testing the Contributed Webserver:
Here are the other random things that I ended up hosting from this webspace:
