Some experimental notes

starting a online seminar, first assignment is introductions
Hi all,

I'm [adric]. I'm a System Administrator for a web hosting company on weekend nights, doing some contract work for a small professional education organization some weekdays, and manage to spend a few minutes each week trying to help the OLPC* folks save the world**, play some video games, and study a bit. I live in one or more suburbs of Atlanta, GA, USA, grew up in another suburb, and work downtown and in the suburbs, variously.

I'm fascinated by and often chasing technology in many of it's varied forms.
In my tiny amount of software development work I first keyed onto basic testing tools (continuous building, unit testing) as part of project automation and quickly became enamoured of the tools which enable me to write better code. I also came into an interest in testing through reading and study computer security. The importance of developer testing, QA, and live evaluation is driven home by the literature (e.g. comp.risks) in security fields over and over again. More broadly I see testing technology in many forms as a way to try and move software forward as a technology so computers may become more reliable and useful to everyone.

In the past week I played some Dungeons and Dragons with friends, finished the PC game Mass Effect, started it again, finished re-reading the Dune novels (Frank Herbert), fooled around with a Japanese childrens' game on Nintendo DS (すもくかわいね), and hassled both of the house cats. I watch movies and some television, although mostly on my Mac laptop.

* The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) foundation aims to put educational tools into the hands of all children worldwide. More at http://laptop.org/
** Saving the world is progressing, but they may have failed to save themselves... heavy staff cuts this week.

I am quite sure I have a lot to learn from this course and all of you.
Thanks for reading,
[adric]

attached: A picture from the NOC here at work from Jan 2007