Geeky Interests ...

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Where I come from, to be called a "geek" is quite a compliment. I think it evolved into what is now called the "FGP Mentality." What is FGP? It stands for Four Guys' Plumbing, which came about during a very arduous senior year at New Mexico Tech.

* Tinkering with Perl is a hobby. I can't believe that I didn't learn this language in school. Go to this site, get the software and learn it! Perl is the "Swiss Army Chainsaw" of scripting languages.
* I enjoy just about anything related to Electrical engineering or computer science. That's why VHDL and Verilog are such cool things. I've written software at work which utilizes the latest dialect of Verilog, Verilog-2000. I just wish there was a good (free) VHDL/Verilog simulators that would compile under FreeBSD.
* Automating stuff is cool--whether it be software at home or at work, automation is always fun (will be broken until Edwin get the pages back on line again). I've got some X10 devices to control outlets, etc. but just haven't had the time yet to tinker with it. Story of my life.
* Anything having to do with FreeBSD keeps me entertained on a daily basis (just ask my wife :). I was an early zealot of OS/2, but alas after 4 years of IBM's less-than-successful management of OS/2 (a product technically better than all MS products ever introduced) I fell from the ranks of the supporters. FreeBSD and Linux share quite a bit in common. They're both absolutely free, they both do a great job, and they both give you UNIX on your desktop. I don't particularly care for Linux because of the hype it receives. I also cut my teeth on SunOS boxes at school so FreeBSD just feels more "natural" to me. I also had to deal with Minix--the predecessor to Linux--so I think that left emotional scars.
* Building electronic gadgets is a form of strange meditation. Though I've done much less of this since graduating from the EE dept. of NMT.

In school I had a hand in the following gEEky sort of projects.
* In addition to programming in Perl, I enjoy programming in just about any language. I'm even finding Emacs Lisp understandable which is a spectacle in itself!

I was a double major in EE and CS at NMT and while roughing my way through this overly complex degree, I got to write quite a few pieces of interesting software. This is a small list of the things I had my hands in.

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Last modified: Sun  Dec 7th, 2003