Technology

I was forced into technology as a child. When I was young I diagnosed with a learning disability. In order to give me a better chance to excel, my father purchased a computer to help me learn and give me the ability to keep up with other students (for some reason, my writing was slow, but my typing was faster). In fourth grade we got our first computer. I wrote some papers, and played a few video games, but it wasn’t until later on in my life that I really became a technologist.

My true venture into technology started in 7th grade. My dad got his powerbook 5300 and wouldn’t let me touch until I read the entire users manual. However, after reading several books on how to use the computer, my father was still unwilling to let me use the computer. In order to better understand the computer, I went to the store on a routine basis and used their computers until I became rather proficient. My next birthday my father bought me my own laptop (powerbook 1400). I got a job interning at the local ISP, sorting papers and taking care of help desk related issues.

My family then moved to Lexington, KY for a year where most of my computer skills were used for managing and creating the school newspaper. The year after my family moved back to CT, and I started taking more computer classes in school.

When I went off to college I was undecided. I didn’t know if I wanted to study psychology or computer science. One semester in the school for liberal arts and science was enough to convince me that I was an engineer. I moved into the computer engineering program and have never looked back.  I did volenteer research for the school on a project involving embedding messages into mpeg movies. I also volenteered doing some research on a grant for social network analysis as well as doing my senior design project in distributed computing.

I work with computers, and I love technology. I try to read Slashdot on a daily basis. I truly care about technology.

My areas of interest include:

• (Social) Network analysis
• Distributed computing
• Code optimization
• codecs and encoding practices
• programming langauges