The Story of Dan
    I was born in Minnesota, and the first 16 years of my life were typical of a midwest-born geek who played lots of musical instruments and spent far too much time in front of a computer.  As a Junior in high school, I opted to take advantage of a wonderful program in Minnesota which goes by the designation  Post Secondary Education which essentially allows any high school junior or senior to apply to any MN college and have all tuition/housing funded by the state.  After a year and a half of  undergraduate computer science study at the University of Minnesota, I transferred to Tulane University in New Orleans.  After another year, I decided to pursue an Internship Opportunity at Argonne National Labs outside of Chicago IL working in the Math and Computer Science Division with the Systems Group.  After a few small projects, I was given the task of integrating the Linux OS into the existing *nix/Windows environment, which soon became a sort of passion as this was around the time when Linux was quickly becoming a very exciting option for high performance, server, and desktop scenarios.    About a year later (I was almost 20), the division was awarded the opportunity to design, build, and manage a large scale Linux Cluster to support scalable application research being conducted by scientists around the world.  We dubbed the cluster 'Chiba City' in reference to the sprawling metropolis used in several of William Gibson's novels.  During the design phase of the cluster, which ended up being a 512 compute CPU super computer, I was offered, and accepted, a full time position as System Administrator with the Systems Group.  over the next three years, I was fortunate enough to work with many scientists and collaborators of MCS, and built several more linux clusters to support various research activities.  My work also involved the creation of scalable cluster management software and I worked closely with the MPICH and Futures Lab groups in pushing the development of parallel file systems, distributed visualization systems, and other parallel tools.  While working, I pursued a Masters Degree of Computer Science from the University of Chicago, which I was granted in June, 2002.  Although my work at Argonne was immensely satisfying, I felt the time had come after five tremendous years to pursue my original ultimate goal, which was and is to become a contributing force in computer science research.  Toward that end, I transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara as a graduate student pursuing a PhD, which is where you'll find me today.  My luck held as I landed in the research group of Dr. Richard Wolski here at UCSB, whose group is involved in high performance wide area computing research.  Since coming to UCSB, I have been involved in small coding projects related to the NWS (Network Weather Service) project, as well as starting original research involving characterization of workstation resource failures in distributed systems.  In the Fall of 2003, I was also honored with the opportunity to design curriculum for and teach a mid-level undergraduate course entitled 'C, C++ and UNIX programming'.