Julie Lavoie: the gory details

Education

I'm a second year Pure Math student at the University of Waterloo. My initial plan was to double major in Pure Math and Computer Science, but that has been somewhat modified by a combination of badness on the part of the CS department and awesomeness on the part of the PM department here. However, everyone seems to think that I'm in CS. I have a few goals for my education. One of them is to learn a third language by the time I graduate, with Italian and Japanese being the current candidates. I used to be a Computer Science major at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, but it sucked, so I came here instead.

Work

I'm currently an undergrad research assistant for Prof. Andrew Malton, in the Software Architecture Research Group. I hack (or attempt to, anyways) on cppx. Fun, fun. My two previous jobs were doing technical editing for SANS and being a student-teacher at the 2001 Canada/USA Mathcamp. Before that, I was a Unix sysadmin for Concordia University. I left Concordia briefly to be a sysadmin at Zero-Knowledge Systems when it was the cool place to work in Montreal, but then came back to Concordia when I discovered that school and start-ups just don't mix. The summer before starting undergrad at Concordia I wrote code and managed Linux boxen for the CDEACF. My very first geek job was being a tech support rep for CAM Internet, a job which made me old and bitter beyond my tender years.

In my past life as a minimum-wage earning teenager, I also taught horseback-riding to kids, canvassed door-to-door for Greenpeace, sold leather clothes in old Quebec to Japanese tourists, and cleaned people's apartments for money.

Pointless Geek Trivia

(Non-geeks may want to avert their eyes) My first computer was a Trash 80. It used a tape recorder as a storage device. To play games you had to fast-forward the tape to the appropriate index and press play. My first programming language was C. I also learned some Visual Basic at around the same time, but I try to forget this ever happened. I like to deny any knowledge of Windows; my therapist supports this decision.

I used to be the kind of annoying person that engages in pointless OS/distribution flame wars ("Here's a nickel, kid. Buy yourself a real computer.") In my old age my snobbishness has shifted to food and I don't care; I run Debian because I like apt-get.

I've worked with Linux, Solaris, True64 Unix (or whatever DEC is calling it this week), Irix and NetBSD. Linux-wise, I've run most distributions, from Slackware to Redhat to Suse to ridiculous distributions made up of two tarballs and a HOWTO saying "good luck". My dirty little secret is that I know how to use VMS. I can also do ftp by hand, using netcat.

T-shirts with source code on them make me happy.

Soft skills

I can:

I'm a hopeless night person.

I can eat more sushi in one sitting than anyone I know.