I've been interested in computers for a very long time. I have an uncle who was a programmer and generally into technology (I remember being at his house at an early age, poking at this amazing machine with a "tv screen" and keyboard - a computer he had built...one of several he owned.), and after having played with a Sinclair ZX-81 he had lent me, he gave us (yeah, technically it was a gift to our family - heh!) a Commodore VIC-20. That was grade 5, and I was hooked. Then I made the connection that you could wrangle these machines and get paid for it, and it seemed too good to be true. I didn't change my mind about what I wanted to do from that point.

While I was still working on getting my degree in Computing and Information Science from the University of Guelph, I was already gravitating toward system administration. Having gone through the co-op program, I already had some experience under my belt, and being part of a start-up helped to develop my skills in the still-up-and-coming area of website and web app development. I made the switch back to academia in 1999, as a system administrator in the Computer Science department at Princeton University, and after 13 years there, have moved on to the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Carnegie Mellon University as a systems and software engineer.

I am a member of several professional organizations, including (logos on the right): the Association of Computing Machinery, the IEEE Computer Society, USENIX, and The System Administrators Guild.