User Profile

U of Toronto graduate with a specialist in Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, major in Computer science, and minors in Philosophy and Psychology (it was a busy four years). Now working in the Application and Integration Middleware group at IBM's Toronto Lab. I am a fully buzzword compliant developer, working on integration middleware and b2b tooling using Java and XML. Please don't hate me. :)

I am a geek. My business cards list my title as "Hacker". I am one of those people who take names like that upon themselves, and don't consider it an insult to have the name given to them by others. I take things, especially technological things, apart. I put things, especially technological things, together. Even my non-tech hobbies like cooking tend to be things I geek out on, read about, study in the hope of grokking. And in my day to day dealings with the universe, I tend to be geeky, and ask geeky questions.

But I'm apparently not a typical geek either. I wasn't bullied constantly in high school, and I didn't hate my teachers. I loved school, and still do, now that I'm out of school, most of my reading is non-fiction anyhow, just to keep learning. I'm not socially awkward, I don't get furious with people who don't understand computers, or with stupid people in general. I suppose it all boils down to the notion that you'll actually have to get to know me if you want to know what I'm like. I suppose it all boils down to the fact that mini-bios never do a person justice.

My latest creation and current part-time hacking interest is CanonicalTomes.org - a user-contributed collection of definitive works (Canonical Tomes) in every subject that has one. It's a big old catalog of books, essentially, and if you ever need a definitive XML, C, Chemistry, or Blacksmithing book, I would recommend checking it out. At this point it works pretty well and I'm always interested in improving it, but it will work better if you just go visit it right now.

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	johnath@livejournal.com
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