If you clicked over here, you must want to know a bit about me, so here it goes . . .
I am a recent graduate from Virginia Tech's Computer Science department. I have enjoyed the years in the (mostly) beautiful Blacksburg, Virginia, but look forward to moving wherever a "real job" might take me (notable exceptions: Afghanistan, Iraq, the West Bank, etc.).
While born in Christiansted, St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, I was unfortunate enough to only live there the first three weeks of my life (or fortunate, considering the drastic increase of violent home invasions during 1980). The next 18 years of my life would be spent in Tennessee.
The first 10 of those were in a small town (approximately 5,000 people) called Huntingdon. While the town lacked in larger city amenities or entertainment, all I cared about at that age were playing in the yard and biking, for which the town was superb, given its relatively empty streets.
After I completed 4th grade, my parents decided it would make more sense for us to move an hour south to Jackson instead of what would be their both commuting there to work. With its population of 50,000, Jackson was quite the large city after Huntingdon. Not only did it have more than one movie theatre, but also had bowling alleys and my then-favorite, putt-putt golf. While elementary and middle school were fairly uneventful, I did make up for that during my stint at Jackson Central-Merry High School (JC-M).
In 10th grade, my writing a Goals 2000 educational grant for Madison County schools pulled in close to $10,000 to be used for foreign language multimedia technology. In 11th grade, I participated in the first Academic Decathlon team from JC-M that won the state championship then went to the national finals. Then in 12th grade, a two-page newsletter I developed caught the attention of many people, including the publishers of ZineWorld. It consisted of a pointed, slightly colorful series of articles that hit a certain principal a little too close to home. After further scrutiny, this time official, that same principal was demoted and has since left the area. Overall, my high school years proved to be most interesting.
I started out at Virginia Tech as a General Engineer with intentions of going into Computer Engineering. While living in the dorms, I quickly began to doubt if I had chosen the right major. After getting to know several senior CS majors and one CpE major, and getting a sneak peak of what would lie ahead of me in each curriculum, I realized that designing databases fascinated me much more than designing circuits. While I did squeak past the Engineering weed-out courses, my mind had been made up and my new major was Computer Science.
The next several years proved very educational, not just academically, but socially as well. After having over 10 different roommates through the years (living in 5-person apartments/houses can rack up the numbers fast) I have learned how to deal with just about the worst roommates possible. (The lazy pothead, the lazy mooch, and the lazy egomaniac are some of the memorable characters.) The good ones more than cancelled out the bad, though.
While some of it has caused struggles, some of my academic work has been the most rewarding and interesting part of attending Virginia Tech. Over the past couple of years, I have developed an interest in geography, with a specific fascination with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). I was fortunate enough to take several classes from that department, ranging from introductory information on working with ESRI's ArcMap to more advanced coding using Visual Basic 6.0 and ESRI's MapObjects 2.2. Some of the code I got to produce in that class was quite fascinating (not to mention useful) and ranged from creating sample software to help in political redistricting to graphically computing and displaying hillshading, aspect, and slope from a DEM file.
Another project I, along with several other people, got involved in during my Multimedia class was to redesign the campus map for Virginia Tech. We got to work with some very fine people in University Relations to come up with a new system that would not only make updates easier for them (anyone who has visited the campus recently knows how often the map needs to be updated with the non-stop flow of new buildings) but also make it easier to use and navigate. While the project was an overall success, they haven't been able to adopt it as a replacement yet due to several technical difficulties. I am continuing to work on this project and hope that they will still be able to adopt our version. User feedback has been tremendously positive and I think it would be a shame to see this project go unused.
During my last semester at Tech, I was able to assist with construction of Virginia Tech's X supercomputer. While my participation was limited to moving machines and organizing cabling, it was an enjoyable experince to work with such a noteworthy machine. X is a supercomputing cluster consisting of 1,100 Apple G5s with an Mellanox Infiniband interconnect. According to many experts in the field, X has revolutionized the supercomputing philosophy by shifting focus to large numbers of commodity components instead of small numbers of more expensive, custom components. By achieving over 10 teraflops (10 trillion operations per second), X was recognized as the third fastest supercomputer (at the time) for the November 2003 Supercomputing Conference.