About Me
I have spent most of my life in Spartanburg South Carolina, the town where I was born. After graduating from the Spartanburg Day School, I had no idea what to do, so I went to college. While in college, I had my first exposure to computer programming and eventually decided to pursue computing as a profession. Since the liberal arts college I was attending had no computer science major, I came back home to Spartanburg and enrolled at USCS. I recently graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science.
From September 2005 to August 2006, I participated in the Lutheran Volunteer Corps, through which I taught computer literacy in a low-income Minneapolis neighborhood. Now that my LVC year is up, I work as a computer programmer in Northeast Minneapolis.
Nerdy Computer Stuff
Since 1998, I’ve relied on some form of Unix-like operating system for my daily computing needs. I’ve used different variants of Linux and BSD, but seem to keep coming back to NetBSD. and Gentoo Linux.
As much as I like Unix, I’ve never been a fan of “User-friendly” desktop environments like KDE and GNOME. For a long time, the only graphical applications I used were the FVWM2 window manager, xterm, and a graphical web browser. That changed at the end of 2003, when I bought an Apple iBook. OS X provides me with all the command-line Unix tools I need and comes with a well-designed, fully-functional desktop environment that absolutely smokes what’s been coming out of the Free Software community lately. So, while I still keep Linux and BSD around, I spend most of my computing time in front of my Mac.
I’m a big fan of the Python programming language, but haven’t figured out how to make any money off of that yet. When I was in university, I wrote a lot of C and C++ code, but I don’t use those languages for recreational programming projects. I’m told that Ruby is the new hotness, so I bought a book and am in the process of learning that.