I am a Computer Sciences major at the University of Wisconsin.
My current interests include:
While my interest in games is at the moment academic, I do enjoy them and allocate far too much time to them. I am particularly fond of first person shooters, and have recently p0wn3d n00bs in Team Fortess 2 and Day of Defeat: Source. I also enjoy the single-player action of the entire Half-Life series, Call of Duty, and Doom 3 (with its wicked dynamic lights).
Graphics:OpenGL and shader languages are interesting to me. I'm also excited about the future of GPGPUs. Notably, I will be spending this coming summer (2008) interning for NVIDIA.
C++:I took a class specifically to learn, and have since completed two classes requiring (and refining) the use of this language. I also completed a project during an internship at LLNL using C++. I do know Java, but I have recently felt driven away from it, though that is mostly due to the nature of the projects I have been undertaking.
The Best Answer:I enjoy being able to give the "best" answer. For example, if I were asked what my favorite programming language is, and that is the extent of the question, I say "the best language to do the job." It would be wrong to answer C++ before hearing a project specification.
The Best Tool for the Job:At the cost of countless hours of additional (academically unnecessary) work, I have maintained a commitment to using the best tool for the job. Research paper? LaTeX. Math homework? Probably also LaTeX. Diagrams? Visio. Text editing? Emacs. Programming (under Windows)? Visual Studio. Graphs? Maybe gnuplot. Sometimes this stings me, such as when I learned how to use LaTeX to draw node-link graphs, and then spent two hours drawing them, tediously, using xy-pic, when ten minutes with a pencil in the region left blank by my 'figure' would have been sufficient. Other times it has helped me, allowing me to easily hand it homework assignments in PDF (not to mention being about to search them) from afar, when necessary.
LaTeX:I dedicated an extensive amount of time to learning LaTeX. It all started when I made the decision to begin doing my math homework on a computer. This decision was not entirely unfounded, given the class, though it is not a foregone conclusion that it is the "best tool" for all homework. I still do many (non-technical) papers in Word, and I still do a lot of homework with a paper and a pencil, as a learning tool. Nonetheless, I have built a strong understanding of LaTeX, to the extent that I can properly use the "best tool" packages to do algorithms (alg2e) and node link graphs (xy-pic). When LaTeX is not equipped, I will use, say, gnuplot, and include a figure. I did try many other options for incorporating equations into text and formatting it nicely, and found all of them to lack in ease of use. In general, if I have to reach for the mouse to do the equation, and the select using a mouse each special symbol to be inserted, the solution is not going to work. If I am not able to distinguish between variables and normal text, that is a problem. If I cannot load and edit the file on any machine in the CS department, or if the application I use will not run on my Apple PowerBook, I cannot use it. These constraints led me to LaTeX. Sometimes one must trade ease of use for control.
My Resume (References available upon request)