About Me
So you want to know more about me? Well, my name's Nick. I'm a graduate of
Ohio State University (BS CIS). Don't ask
me why I decided to go to school there... I'm not really a football fan
(although getting into a mob mentality every other week or so can be
amusing), and before I started school there I'd already spent the vast
majority of my life in Columbus. So, why I wanted to stay is beyond
me. If you have any ideas as to why, please clue me in, won't you?
Anyway, what do I do for fun? Lots of stuff. Hang out with friends,
code, play video games, watch movies, and artistic stuff like
playing/writing music and drawing. A list of some of the other stuff is
below. My primary computer science interests include networking,
operating systems, and security. I was also president (official title:
Benevolent Dictator) of the Open Source Club at Ohio State. We did
lots of cool stuff.
Unfortunately, due to my lack of time in my final year and other issues,
we lost some momentum. Hopefully the new administration will do a better
job with the club than I did.
Back by not-so-popular demand (ok, no demand at all), here's a (still
rather bad) picture of me (but infinitely better than the one I used to
have up here).
School
I was a graduate student for a year at UIUC studying computer science. I ended up leaving because, well, it just wasn't for me, and I figured I'd be happier in what is referred to as "the real world". I was right. I am happier.
As I said above, I did my undergraduate work at
Ohio State University. I took classes on software
engineering, assembly programming, systems software design and
implementation, operating systems (both theory and implementation),
algorithms, data structures, computer architecture, programming
languages, finite automata, formal languages, networking,
databases, distributed systems, and a few
classes on programming in specific languages (C, C++, Java, and the
almighty Common Lisp). I also did a little bit of undergraduate
"research" for the Europa Research Group,
but moved away from that in order to have a job so I could earn
money to support myself in the summers,
as well as to spend time on the Open Source Club, of
which I was the Benevolent Dictator.
Work
I'm currently happily employed working for a network security company that does really cool stuff. I work with amazingly intelligent people who always challenge me to do better. It rocks.
I was previously employed as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the Computer Science department at UIUC. My first semester there, I TA'd for CS450 (Numerical Analysis). The second semester, I TA'd for CS420 (Parallel Programming), which allowed me to hone my skills using pthreads, MPI and OpenMP.
While at Ohio State, I worked in the Systems Operations
Center (SOC) of the Computer and Information Science
Department at the Ohio State
University as an Operator. Basically, that meant I was a help desk
(helldesk) worker, answering questions and solving issues or escalating
them to the sysadmins when I didn't have the required permissions to fix
something. I also had the rather fun job of killing out-of-control
processes on the login servers, as well as the ability to control
the lock system for pretty much all of the Department's rooms.
I also held the position of consultant manager for the Unix
and Java consultants that work in the Department's labs. This meant I was
responsible for the hiring of new consultants, as well as scheduling
them at each new quarter, and generally making sure they did their jobs
the way they're supposed to.
Lastly, I graded CIS560 during autumn and spring quarters of 2003-04. For those
of you who don't know, CIS560 is the third writing course required of
all CIS, CSE and ECE majors at Ohio State. It is also the systems
software design and implementation course. The students will design and
code an assembler, linker and simulator for an architecture to be
defined by the instructor. This is probably the most difficult course
that CS majors have to take, as well as probably the most difficult
course to grade. Projects not only involve thousands of lines of code
and comments, but also hundreds of pages of documentation, as well as
"interactive grading sessions" where the graders and the instructor sit
down with the students on the due dates of the projects and run anywhere
from 10 to 50 test cases through each group's project in an attempt to
break them. This is done with the students so they have a chance to fix
things and not lose points. It was a lot of work, especially with
everything else I did, but it was fun.
Fun Stuff
Music - Music is awesome. I listen to music all the time. I listen to it
all over the place. Work, home, classes. Wherever I can get away with
it. I also play music. Violin, guitar, bass, and keyboards (sorta).
Literature - Books rule. Try walking away from your computer
sometime and reading one. You'll thank me later.
German - The language. It rocks up, down, and all around. It's
especially fun to speak it at people who don't know the language.
LOTS of other things - Get out in the world. Try some stuff. It's
fun. And you'll thank me later.