 Nickname:
"Nico"
Real Name: Nico
Age: Too damn old for this
Resides: Boston, Massachusetts
Occupation: Building Linux superclusters
Favourite websites: http://ctrlaltdel-online.com
Favourite application, game, and program of all time: Outcast (out of date, but it was a leading third-person-shooter for its time, and boy was it fun.)
What are you working on right now: Rebuilding a laptop so my toddler doesn't break my desktop when she plays
"Kids Next Door" web games. NFS boot. Cluster management tools. Implementing OS auto-installers. Re-integrating discarded drivers into the latest 2.6 kernels to install new OS's on particular motherboards that chose very unfortunate chipsets. Replacing half-a-dozen scattered, out-of-date servers with one supportable box. Teaching people about the "keychain" SSH tool. Trying to get people not to use Excel spreadsheets for text documents. Implementing source control systems. Trying to get rid of Active Directory as a primary DNS server.
What is your current Wallpaper/Screensaver: None, I like random.
What's so special about your computer room: It's in vastly better shape than it was when I started. NDA and security concerns prevent me discussing details, but I've helped the heat problem a lot by transferring a *lot* of scattered old functions on different servers to a small set of capable machines with good cooling.
How many computers do you have: Personally? 300 MHz Thinkpd laptop discarded by my old job, an HP Pavilion desktop from a few years ago that needs some repair, and a PC's For Everyone desktop I got last year.
What was your first computer: It was a paper and pencil binary "How Computers Work" project when I was
about 10 years old. It counts, it was a Turing machine.
Do you remember the first program you ran on it: Something in the manual to do some sums.
Geekiest moment of your life: Putting someone in an MRI chamber with electrodes in their brain, wired up
to equipment I personally designed, and getting functional scans of what happens when you stimulate one ear and not the other. (They wee deaf, and MRI's are very loud, so these were the only fMRI scans ever done of hearing from one side and not the other.)
This was closely followed by OS installing 13,000 Linux systems all in the same week with the tools I wrote.
When did you first realize you were a geek: Geek as in unpopular? 1st grade. Geek as in techno-geek? More in high school, where I got access to my first real computers and played a lot of the old Star Trek ASCII game.
If I was a program I'd be: EMACS, but written in C instead of Lisp. Lisp: ye ghods, I know it's pretty, but deliberately writing programs that say "and then a miracle occurs" instead of defining the interface is unkind to others, and hopefully without that excessive use of both the Ctrl and the Esc keys that tears up your hands. But also ye ghods, it has a lot of powerful and cool features built into it that no one has time to explore fully, like all the auto-formatting programming tools, the tower-of-hanoi game, the Eliza program for auto-responding to your verbal comments, the Zippy quoter, the psychoanalyze-pinhead tool for hooking them together, and all sorts of other fun.
Favourite quote: It changes with mood and recent events. "Tranq, truth, then kill" is a favorite from live-action role play games, as well as "No shit, there I was" from Pennsic War stories.
What do you do when you're not at your computer(s): Not enough, work has been hammering me. Awaken my daughter, talk with my wife, visit friends for their weekly parlor night, occasionally get a little time to myself and catch a really bad movie my wife would never want to see. Sin City was especially fun, if you're an old Frank Miller comic book fan like me.
What is the funniest/most bizarre computer/Internet experience you have ever had: Oooff. Not NDA covered, the one I can say was finding that the author of a particular web search tool that I need some help from was an old friend from my $cientology spam huntiing days was pretty good.
You have a time machine that can only be used once. If you use it you won't come back. What date would you set it to, and what ONE thing would you take with you (not a computer): The day before Palm Sunday, Christ's walk into Jerusalem, early in the morning and bring an Apache helicopter with full load and crew. Go over to the crucifixion area, clear out the guards, and cut down and patch up all the poor bastards on crosses. You get to save a few people (who may or may not be worth saving), but you get to muck up the creation of one of the most tragic legends in human history and all its resulting mythologies. Then find Christ and keep him alive spreading his messages of peace, instead of letting him turn into a martyr and be misquoted for millennia.
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The Truth Behind The Geek (*creative liberties taken for the benefit of the reading audience)
Nico, who is a JOAT, (a Jack-Of-All-Trades), is trying to make it up to his wife for the last year of overwork and late hours. Nico has been involved in just about every field he can think of in the geek world, from hardware design to user GUI's up to large scale systems integration, and he loves pulling knowledge from one field to apply to another. The result is that he speaks, casually, a lot of the older core computer languages and can at least follow the code in newer ones, and he still get involved in showing dirty tricks in the machine shop to manufacturers, and pulling old tools out of my bag of tricks to make it work right.
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