About Me

Hi! I’m a 30-something programmer (EE, really) in Champaign-Urbana, working as a QA Engineer at Wolfram Research. Previous homes have included Seattle (Bainbridge Island) and Boston, where I’ve held jobs in diagnostics and manufacturing testing development for the telecommunications, supercomputing, and storage industries.

I have 1.2 degrees — first a BSEE from Rose-Hulman. Then two years towards a M.S./PhD in EE from Northeastern, working on TCM in partial-response channels [1] — basically, taking the stuff that makes 56K modems work where previously you had only 14.4K modems, and applying that to a PR channel: the classic example being a magnetic hard disk. Combine the PR side information with the trellis coding to get maximal performance gains.

Eventually I decided graduate EE work was way less practical and interesting than the hands-on stuff I loved at the undergraduate level. But — I still wanted to teach. So abrupt shift of plans. I entered an accelerated program for a Masters in Education at U Mass Amherst, and ended up teaching several math classes at Newton Mass High School. Yikes. I am not made of the Right Stuff to be a high school teacher. Time to go back to engineering…

I’ve worked at Cascade, Ascend, Lucent, Ignitus, WaveSmith, and Ciena (all Boston area networking companies — many interrelated via acquisitions and mergers), plus a very brief stint at Mangrove Systems. Then the 3000 mile trek to the left coast to work first at Cray, then Isilon Systems. Most recently, I started a QA job at Wolfram Research, the makers of Mathematica. Check it all out at my resume.

I’m married, and have 8 kids (well, 2 dogs and 6 cats) (RIP Zoe). Yes, I know that’s insane. We stopped.

My wife Malaika used to run her own errand service here on Bainbridge Island, for which I designed and maintained the web page. While she no longer runs this company, I kept a copy of her old web site, if you’re interested.

Notes

  1. Ok, there’s no wikipedia entry for PR channels. But, there is a wiki for PRML which is related, and Google gave several interesting articles including: