FAQ
- Who are you?
- A citizen of the planet Earth.
- Could you be more specific ?
- My name is Brendan O'Connor; I'm a graduate student at The Johns Hopkins University; I study in the Whiting School of Engineering, in the Department of Computer Science. From time to time, I find myself gainfully employed; at the moment, I am an engineer in the Open Platforms Group at Six Apart.
- What is this page?
- This is a collection of many (though not all) of the actions I take on the web, as they happen.
- How do you do this?
- The base software is Movable Type Open Source, with the Action Streams plugin. Then I run its update cron job every half-hour, which collects new actions from around the web and updates the site accordingly.
- Why are you doing this?
- Well, a variety of reasons; partly as an experiment, partly to show people how many of the actions they take are exposed on the Internet, all the time, and partly because I thought it was really cool. A couple of posts on my blog about it are here: before I set it up, and after.
- Aren't you worried people might see something they disagree with?
- Not hugely. As I noted above, all this information is exposed on the web anyway; I've just collected it for your enjoyment and convenience. I expect that most people looking to talk to me perform the web culture's usual due diligence, and look through websites about me before contacting me anyway-- so they'd get it all in any case.
- Aren't you worried that potential employers might not hire you?
- Wait-- because I *acknowledge* security risks (or more correctly, consequences)?
- No, because you might say something they disagree with.
- Ah. No, I'm not. But I' m certainly willing to acknowledge I may be mistaken, so if you're an employer, and you're not hiring me because of that, please let me know! :-)
- This is stupid.
- That's not a question.
- Do you have a blog?
- Yes, I do; it's at http://blog.ussjoin.com. I try to post on it frequently (though I do not always succeed), so please go take a look. It's a mixture of technical and personal posts, but I hope to entertain a large swath of my audience.
- Can I email you?
- Absolutely. For professional inquiries, please use the email address at the top of my resume; for all other inquiries, please use blog@, followed by my domain name. In any case, feel free to use appropriate encryption.
- You're a huge geek.
- Also not a question, but I'll just go ahead and assent anyway.
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