![[Picture of Brian]](brgsba.jpg)
I live with my wife Vanessa and my cat in Santa Clara County, California. You can see what the weather is like here. If you need my phone number or my home address, please send me an e-mail. I also have a GPG public key.
I worked for Green Hills Software for a long time. I was previously a grad student at UIUC, studying computer science. I earned a Master of Computer Science degree there.
I've worked many interesting jobs over the years, which can variously be described as "programmer", "system administrator", "computer science researcher", and "teacher". If you are interested in all the details, you can check out my resume.
I used to go to Berkeley, where I studied computer science and linguistics, as well as lots of other random things. When I was there, I was an officer and/or a member of several clubs: CSUA, CSSA, OCF, XCF, UPE, and SLUG. I was also a staff member of the Instructional Support Group for 4 years. I graduated from Berkeley with my bachelor's degree in May 2002.
I grew up near Cincinnati, Ohio, and attended Cincinnati Country Day School for 12 years until May 1997.
I like to run. I've finished the Chicago Marathon, as well as many, many other races. When I was at UIUC, I was a member and group leader in the Illini Runners club.
I also like to cook. I have got an online recipe collection, which contains several of my own recipes, as well as those which I've found and altered to suit my own tastes. If you're too busy for real food, maybe you should have some Haw Flakes... they're better than Advanced Tea Substitute.
I am an FAA certificated private pilot. I learned to fly the venerable Cessna 172 at Spitfire Aviation. Flying is an incredible rush -- if you have ever wondered what it would be like, you should definitely take a trip to your local airport and take a demo flight with a local flight instructor.
I studied for and successfully obtained an FCC Amateur Radio license by examination (callsign KI6FDP), only to discover that not only can I not receive television signals at my house, I can't receive much of anything else either. Maybe someday...
I have long enjoyed programming as a hobby, although it depends a lot on how busy I am doing other things (and now that I'm a software engineer full-time, I don't do quite so much restful, refreshing hacking as I used to.) I've contributed to several open-source or free-software projects, including: NetBSD/mac68k, the Linux shadow-utils, sendmail, GNU libc, GCC, and LLVM. I've also started my own open-source projects: VMIPS and WebNews. And finally, I have some random assorted hacks that you can download.
Lately I have been trying to get back into the habit of using NetBSD a little. To that end, I am writing a little summary of what happens when I try to use NetBSD on my laptop.
Random stuff I like: Margaret Atwood. The Economist. Douglas Adams. Over the Rhine. The San Jose Mercury News. Final Fantasy (especially Nobuo Uematsu's amazing music!). Sid Meier's Civilization and Alpha Centauri. The Electronic Frontier Foundation. CBC's As It Happens.
Now, you may be inclined to think that my home page looks insufficiently flashy. In the words of a wise man, I reply: "Call me a crank if you will. I care not."