I have been playing the piano since 2nd grade (thats almost 16 years!). Nowadays, I only ever practice Debussy and Gershwin.

Computer programming/hacking since 8th grade. Thats when I installed my first linux distro completely DIY (since I had no mentor, my first distro was a purchased Red Hat Linux. I had no idea there was such a thing as FREE software!)

BS in General Engineering from UIUC. Spent a lot of time learning/building servers instead of going to classes.

Professionally, my arena is industrial automation (realtime embedded). All the major brands of PLC, Touchscreens, Drives/Servos; Lots of networking and systems automation; emphasis on electronics and technology integration. My typical job description is helping companies bridge different protocols/manufacturers/control-layers into unified control systems, with a specialty in legacy hardware adaption.

As far as my secondary computer skillz, technically I am only an enthusiastic amateur (I did some freelance web applications in college although).

At this point, I am quite comfortable on nearly all flavors of Windows and most of the popular Linux distros (debian is my favorite). I hate M$ Windows, but since I use it more than 80% of the time, I know it much better than I would like.

I can read, edit, and compile many programming languages (from Assembly/C to Java to Javascript/ECMA3), but my most fluent languages for writing applications are Python and Adobe-Flash-Actionscript (and from industrial programming: BASIC-type languages and ladder-logic, uck!)

Favorite Quote: RTFM - Read the F***ing Manual