A Profile of Myself

• Name: Mark Paul Kamichoff
• Birthday: August 11, 1981
• Home Town: North Brunswick, NJ, United States
• School: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 
• Current Residence: Charlotte, NC, United States
• My Details: Personal preferences and contact information
• My Résumé: No, I'm currently not looking for a job

I grew up in North Brunswick, NJ, and attended North Brunswick Township High School, also known as NBTHS.  While in high school, I participated in the robotics club , school newspaper, and was captain of the swim team.  Following that, I attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute , picking up a Bachelor's of Science degree in Computer and Systems Engineering as well as minors in Computer Science  and Psychology .  I became involved in the Rensselaer Student Chapter of The Association of Computing Machinery , and held the position of Chairman of the Systems Administration Committee .

After my undergraduate education, I worked as a security operations center engineer at igxglobal , and later moved on to a position of network engineer at one of the largest cable providers  in the United States.  I currently reside in Charlotte, North Carolina.

I enjoy networking, programming, swimming, and various music genres.  People say I need a life, since I spend way too much time and effort on the computer.  It's probably true, but I don't really care.  There's always so much to code and learn, so I can never understand how people can sit on IRC saying they've been “bored” all day.

Back at RPI  one of my friends introduced me to Linux  via the Slackware  distribution.  After much pain and many headaches, I finally got the hang of Unix-based operating systems and now embrace open-source software and viewpoints.  Linux has really come far in the last six years, from barely supporting USB, to working with the newest hardware and bleeding-edge transport protocols, SCTP and DCCP.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not a complete Linux fanatic, I also have a great respect for the FreeBSD  operating system and various OpenBSD  projects such as pf .

The Xicada  network project at RPI introduced me to the world of networking.  It was the first time I heard terms like GRE tunnels, OSPF, and multipath.  I was definitely interested, and since then have put forth an effort to keep myself actively up to date with the latest networking technologies, even when the country I live in is hopelessly behind in some of them, like IPv6.

On a typical day, I'll probably spend a good amount of time working on NetScreen firewalls , and programming in Perl, Python, and PHP.  I try my best to stay away from Microsoft  products, but am forced to run some of their software at work, in a VM of course.  I typically read Slashdot  and The Register , as well as Google News  if I feel like depressing myself with world events.  When home, I'll either continue coding, or find new ways to break and fix my wide area network.  I try to hit the pool and swim at least 2000 meters, three times per week.

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