About Me :: "Unofficial" Bio

Adam J. O'Donnell is a senior research scientist at Cloudmark, a leading anti-spam company located in beautiful San Francisco. He recently completed his PhD as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow in Drexel University's department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. In a former life, Adam designed RF Amplifier subsystems at Lucent Technologies, where he was awarded a patent for his work. More recent times have found him holding a senior research position at Cloudmark, Inc., a security research position at Guardent, Inc, serving as a principle member of the Logan Group, and consulting for many members of the computer security industry.

Adam likes to read and write books. He has read Pattern Recognition by William Gibson and Jennifer Government by Max Barry, and read part of A People's History of the United States, but stopped when it became too depressing. Adam has written parts of several books, serving as the technical editor and contributer to "Building Open Source Network Security Tools", a contributing author on "Hacker's Challenge", and co-author of "Hacker's Challenge 2".

Adam is an energetic and creative person. He is often seen juggling unwanted orphans three at a time. Adam also donates his free time to good causes, such as saving kittens from trees and taking up arms to defend political refugees. He is a crack shot with a kalashnikov rifle.

After years of being exposed to microwave energy, Adam has developed the super power of invisibility, which he uses to clothesline purse snatchers and feed skittish antelopes at the zoo. He is now attempting to walk on shallow pools of water, and has been successful at temperatures below 270 Kelvin.

In the future, Adam hopes to create his own global religion, and raise children whose destiny is to enslave the entirety of the human species. Under the orders of his offspring, fields will be cleared in his honor, with statues being erected of his likeness that will stand longer than the Giza pyramids. Their despotic regime's severity will force the remaining population into the stars, negating any possibility of future subjugation of the whole of humanity.

His academic research interests are in making graph interfaces to homepages, network security, and baking bread.

FIN!

As I mentioned, I keep this page as static as possible, as the introduction of dynamic content generation only introduces multiple points of failure. If the web ever moves to a purely dynamically generated model, our metadata will become even more abstracted and fragile. The ubiquity of a single database platform, coupled with a malicious worm, could be the next fire in Alexandria. I used to think that we would be better off without the blogs, but now I am starting to wonder if information's long term preservation can be sacrified for rapid dissemination at a low economic cost for certain types of data.

For some reason my friends thinks this cartoon sums me up. In many ways, they are right.

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