About me

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Warning: a lot of this site is hopelessly out of date. I'll update it when I get time. In the meantime, anything you read here could be two or three years old. Cheers! --Christian

Hi. I'm a computer science student at University College Cork. I've just finished third year (with a 1H! Yay!), and I'm looking forward to fourth year. I have some passing acquaintance with other departments in UCC too, in particular the maths department, 4C, and the Boole Centre for Research in Informatics. I came tenth in the 2005-2006 UCC Superbrain out of forty-something contestants, narrowly beaten by my then girlfriend Samantha in seventh place. I'm sure she'll let me forget this some day... :)

I'm currently on work experience at TMC Technology in Ballincollig doing a variety of stuff (hardware and software development - VB (not my choice!) for user interfaces for industrial test systems, process monitoring and inventory control, C and assembler (x86 and Microchip PIC) for process control and communication (TCP/IP, LIN bus, USB) on embedded systems, circuit design, PCB layout for raid systems, embedded ethernet controllers, cable testers and a variety of others (in particular, I enjoy routing high speed signals such as 1 and 2 gigabit fibre channel, and gigabit ethernet), finding compiler bugs with a logic analyser...). I worked at TMC fulltime until I decided I'd had enough of the real world, became a leech on society (commonly referred to as a student) in the autumn of 2001 and since then I've been dithering back and forth between the two (Short attention span? What? How can you say such a... ooh look, shiny!) I'm nominally a mature student, but I try not to let it show :)

Going back a bit, I was born in Holland to a Dutch father and a Finnish mother; they divorced a few years later, and my mother moved to Ireland with me. Why Ireland? Apparently she wanted to make a clean break. I have two half-sisters and a half-brother in Holland (Dutch dictionaries here and here), and another half-brother in Finland (Swedish dictionaries here and here). I'm the baby of the family!

Online I often use the nickname 'Minus1' or 'm1' for short - this refers to a finger I lost as a result of a cycling accident some years ago. Sometimes I also use my initials, cjb.

So... I dunno what else to tell people... I love animals (I have three cats, called Socks, Spectre and Kali); I like nature, the outdoors, and photography (I'm a Fota Wildlife Park member so I can combine these easily); I like films and going to the cinema (I have a Kino membership too), foreign films in particular, and I have quite a few videos, but don't watch TV. I don't drink or smoke; I don't mind people drinking, within reason, but I really hate being anywhere smoky, so I'm delighted with the Irish smoking ban in workplaces, particularly restaurants. I'm also a militant cyclist (gotta love those Cork hills... yeah, I said 'love' didn't I... hmm, wonder why...) who's not afraid to yell at motorists when they need yelling at.

I have a bit of a 'thing' for maps, too, old and new, particularly when it comes to defining data formats in which to share mapping information meaningfully. The Openstreetmap open source mapping engine lets me combine this with my interests in cycling, and travel in general; I'm responsible for most of Openstreetmap's map of Cork. Yay for handlebar-mounted GPS!

Any questions? Mail me at cjbcjb.ie :)

Last update: Jan 2009; last proper update: June 2006

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