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: Just FYI

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 Engineeringas well as minors in Computer Science and Psychology.  I became involved in the Rensselaer Student Chapter of The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), and held the position of Chairman of the Systems Administration Committee (SAC).

Following my undergraduate education, I worked as a security operations center engineer at igxglobal Inc., and later moved on to my current place of employment at a large MSO.  I currently reside in Charlotte, North Carolina and have no immediate plans of moving elsewhere!.

I enjoy computer networking, programming, photography, swimming, and trance music.  I typically spend an inordinate amount of time on the computer and never have understood how people can say they're bored.  I have a thirst for knowledge and understanding and I believe others should have the same.  Nothing bugs me more than people saying things like "it just works, I don't care how."  I feel that is a defeatest and lazy attitude.  This also highlights my attitude toward life, since I believe things should be earned, not given freely or provided via so-called entitlements.  You'll never see me buying a lottery ticket or buying a piece of technology that has a warranty I'm not willing to void.

Back at RPI one of my friends introduced me to Linux via the Slackware distribution.  After much pain and many headaches (figuratively speaking, of course), I finally got the hang of Unix-based operating systems and now embrace open-source software and associated viewpoints.  Linux has come a long way in the last decade, from barely supporting USB, to working with the newest hardware and bleeding-edge network protocols.  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 and OpenSSH.

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 (although it's finally getting back on track).

On a typical day, I'll probably spend a good amount of time working on network designs relating to Juniper, Brocade, and Cisco equipment, while sometimes spending some time working with Unix systems and Perl, PHP and, Python.  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 Engadget, as well as the Drudge Report if I feel like depressing myself with world events.  I try to stay on top of networking technologies by also reading the NANOG, IPv6 operations, and Juniper NSP lists.  When home, I'll either continue hacking on my own network devices, try to stay on top of my reading list, or stream any number of sci-fi titles to my TV over the network.

I try to hit the pool (swimming 2,600 meters at a time) at least five times per week, usually on the weekdays.  On the weekends I'll walk 5-7 km per day.

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