(r4) TobyCabot - Main - The Caboteria

<blockquote>What people mean by the word 'technology' is the stuff that doesn't really work yet. - Danny Hillis</blockquote>

Technology book I'm reading now: Fowler, Martin; _UML Distilled Second Edition_ - the UML is a de facto standard way of describing computer software using pictures.  It's a product of a branch of the industry that I despise (the CASE/process/methods/CMM whiners) but let's face it, there is no common language for describing software and this is pretty good.

Fun book I'm reading now: Patrick O'Brian, _The Wine Dark Sea_.  It's been a while since I've read one of the Aubrey/Maturin adventures.  They're fun!

It's fun to search for your name on the Web.  Tim Berners-Lee calls this "vanity
 surfing." TobyVanitySurf

My Christmas list: TobyXmasList2000.

Given that I've had a little time on my hands I've been playing around with
application development technologies.  The combination
of databases, scripting languages, and Web user interfaces is 
<em>incredibly</em> powerful!  If you haven't played around with 
<a href="http://www.perl.com">perl</a> or <a href="http://www.php.net">php</a>
then you owe it to yourself to find the time to do so.

I've decided that my days of playing LP records are just about over.
OTOH, I've got lots of cool (and not so cool) music on LpRecords.  
So I was pleased to run across 
<a href="http://www.amberdata.demon.co.uk/bplay/">bplay/brec</a> and
<a href="http://www.sulaco.org/mp3/">lame</a> which let you record and
mp3 encode pretty much anything that you can pipe into your soundcard.
I've been using them to record my LP's into MP3.  I'm currently at the
point where I can play my records from work, which is fun.  If only there
were cheap broadband wireless...

When I'm not using the computer (and for most of the CPU time when I am ;)
my spare cycles go to the
<a HREF="http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/">SETI</a> project.
Despite my meager PII/266, I seem to be 
<a href="http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/cgi?email=toby.cabot%40pobox.com&cmd=user_stats">doing pretty well</a>, 
although I've fallen out of the top 5%.  Seems i've got an excuse to get a new
PC!  I wonder if Vicky would agree.

Here's my <A HREF="/~tobyc/resume.html">resume</A> (courtesy of 
<A HREF="http://www.pennpronet.com/">Pronet</A>), 
and an <A HREF="/wiki/bin/view/Main/InformalResume">informal</A> resume (actually an email that I
wrote to a friend).



At work I'm the CTO of a small software company called <nop>SaltFire which builds
business infrastructure for communications carriers.  I'm one of the founders
and I'm having a blast!  We're hiring so please send your resume to toby@saltfire.com.

Before <nop>SaltFire I worked for 
<a href="http://www.kenan.com/">Kenan Systems</a>
as a director in the software development group, at various times
in charge of architecture,
development, and performance groups. We were a cool little
 independent software
company until the founder got greedy and sold out to
<a href="http://www.lucent.com/">Lucent</a>
in early '99.  "Welcome to the Bell System, employee number 156,892.
Please see the nurse for your implant."

Before that I lived in Rhode Island and worked for <a href="http://www.gtech.com/">GTECH</a>.  The technology
is interesting and the people are _great_ but after the founders left
it started to feel too much like a Dilbert cartoon, so I moved back home
to Boston.

If you have comments or suggestions, please email me at toby@caboteria.org.  I love to get non-SPAM email.

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