This about page came into existence shortly after the discovery of emil’s about page and his desire for all websites to have some sort of about page. This is my attempt to satisfy such a request.
About Me
What about me? Born in Bendigo, Victoria, I spent the majority of my years moving around the state (even once interstate). In 1996, I landed in the merry town of Melbourne, attending the school St. Leonard’s College. This is where I schooled for 4 years, meeting emil and the other pants guys and girls.
I finished my VCE there, and stepped forth into tertiary education. One year at RMIT. A year working free at a community radio station, another year working at an engineering company, and then into a Diploma of Computer Systems, at Chisholm Institute of TAFE.
I managed to escape from my degree at Monash University – Bachelor of Computing, where I successfully completed my full-year Industry Experience project for the Monash Synchrotron and got myself back into the big wide world. Whilst somewhat mixed about my experiences there, I do miss the place a few years on. Or at least, the people. Current plans see me going back to do my Masters thesis in the vague future, but nothing confirmed as yet. One of those decisions I’m happy to leave until MUCH later.
Like most of the pants guys, I’ve always had somewhat of an interest in computing. My particular flavor is networking. Blame it on the racks of flashing lights indicating traffic, I’m just interested in how stuff talks to the rest of the world. I’ve been ‘connected’ since early ‘92 via dial-in BBS’. During this time I’ve moved through all the changes of the wired world, and amongst others, had a unique perspective on how things have effected the world over.
I’m interested in all things UNIX. For the latter half of the 90’s I stuck to mostly Linux, preferring Slackware as my distribution of choice. In that time, I’d wager that I’ve probably tried just about every major Linux distribution to surface – and even tried my hand at compiling a system from scratch – ala LinuxFromScratch project, way before gentoo rose up. Since the early 2000’s I’ve had a hefty interest in the BSD’s. Given the desire for being the most secure operating system mentality for OpenBSD I opted to choose that for my routers. When upgrading became too much of a task, I chose to make the switch to FreeBSD. Ports still makes my life easier in a number of different ways, and upgrading is usually painless.
I have a fairly hefty interest in visualization. Initially got introduced via projects involved with work, but have quickly applied what I’d learnt to the systems I have here at home.
I’m got back majorly into photography. I once started out with my Dad’s Leica all those years ago, and mid 2003 I took the plunge and bought myself a proper digital SLR camera, the Canon EOS 300D. Since then, I’ve purchased half a dozen lenses including my baby – the Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS. Of course, since then I’ve also upgraded from the Digital Rebel to the Canon 40d. I’ve also gained a large interest in strobist photography along with Neil.
