Hi, I'm Brian O'Shea. I graduated from SCU with a BS in Chemistry. I used to work for Hewlett-Packard at the Cupertino site, for the System Reliability Testing department. They test the reliability of the HP-UX operating system (which you might be using right now to view this web page if you are in the SCU Engineering Design Center). Hewlett-Packard is an amazing company, and if you are interested in working there, drop me a line. I am still in contact with a lot of people there, and they are hiring (who isn't?).
Now I work for Network Appliance, also a really cool company. Technically, at the time that I wrote this, I hadn't started at NetApp yet (my first day is August 23). I will be taking a week off.
For part of my week off, I will be attempting to climb Mt. Whitney. I plan to take the Mountaineer's Route (following the north fork of Lone Pine Creek). I have done this once before, but this time I only have time to do it in one day, so it should be pretty exciting! Also, last time I had to turn back when I was less than 500 feet from the top, due to rapidly worsening weather conditions and a dangerous descent down a couloir.
Occasionally I still take classes at various places in the area. In Winter 1998 I audited Dr. Qiang Li's Operating Systems course (COEN 177). As an alumnus you can audit courses for next to nothing (it was $25.00 when I did it). Get the most out of this place, you are paying for it!
I have also taken a few courses through UCSC Extension. I specifically enjoyed Building Data Structures and Advanced C Programming, which focused on data structures and algorithms for storage and lookup, such as dynamic arrays, linked lists, hash tables, and binary trees. The most valuable thing that I learned from this class, however, was a programming style which has changed the way that I think about writing code entirely. I won't spoil it for you, take the class! The instructor at the time was Frank Jas. He is one of the best programming instructors I have ever had.
I would really like to take Kirk McKusick's UNIX Kernel Internals Course some day, and if I can arrange the time in my schedule I will probably do it. Dr. McKusick taught a two-day intro course to this material at FreeBSDCon in October 1999, which I attended (the name has since been changed to BSDCon). This was very interesting (although a somewhat superficial treatment of the subject due to the time constraints).
You can e-mail me at my SCU Design Center account and one way or another it will get to me.
Last modified Wed May 31 19:31:08 PDT 2000 by Brian O'Shea
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