About Me
I am a Ph.D student, currently working as an research assistant at LSU's Center for Computation and Technology. If you'd like to read more about my research, click here. To learn about my hobbies and personal life, keep reading!
Interests - Technology
I've loved keeping up with technology ever since I was young. I cut my teeth on the trusty ol' Commodore 64 and Apple ][, and have kept up with computers since. Nowadays, things are so much more complex, there's a lot more to figure out! I still remember looking over the C64's documentation, finding a memory map, and thinking up the best ways of doing goofy things with this newfound information. One of my biggest hopes is to retain this sense of wonder about technology for the rest of my life.
Interests - Music
I never had the opportunity to play an instrument when I was younger, so I went ahead and taught myself the basics anyhow using my computer. The music from the old-style demoscene was often made available to download, and with tracker programs I could pick them apart and figure out how they worked. I'm by no means accomplished, but I still enjoy hacking away with my keyboard and tweaking different effects to see what happens. For whatever reason, writing music seems to engage the same parts of my brain as programming does, which I think is pretty neat.
Interests - Weird Tech Mods
Years ago, I cobbled together a liquid cooling system for my computer out of old car parts I'd scavenged from the local junkyard. The system ran well enough, but my processor was still at about the same temperature that it was with my old heatsink, around fifty degrees celsius. The solution? I stuck the automobile transmission radiator out in-between my storm window and outer window, and left it there in the middle of winter. This cooled the processor down to room temperature, and let me increase my computer's front-side bus speed by about 70%.
Since then, I haven't really been as active in doing Weird Things to Cool my Computer, but it turns out there's quite a lot of professionally-made accessories for that sort of thing on the market today. When I build my next machine, I'll have to put a system like that together -- without junkyard parts :)
Miscellaneous things that are neat
Mandelbulb - Could it be? A 3D Mandelbrot set at last?
Hack A Day - Hardware hacks, updated daily! Lots of cool stuff on here that might make you want to get a degree in Computer Engineering.
Slashdot - It's pretty unlikely that you're reading this page and don't read Slashdot, but here it is anyways. Hooray for assorted tech news!