Todd Kover's Fair and Balanced Hypertext Plan/Home Page

Howdy, and welcome to my purty home page!

Name:
Todd Kover

Born:
31 Dec 1972
Died:
not yet.

Mail:

kovert@omniscient.com

Occupation:

groovy Computer Geek

Office:

Wherever I happen to be

Nifty things about me...

(ie, more than you could ever want to know).

This page was originally created in 1994 or 1995 (back before they were called "home pages") and as time goes on I seldom check to see if all the links are still valid, so many of them probably don't work. In fact, the furthur you get away from this line, the less accurate this page is likely to be, although it is always fair and balanced.
I got married in June 2004 at Konopiste Castle, near my wife's hometown which is an hour or so south of Prague, in the Czech Republic. We added a daughter to our family in 2006.
I work for Vonage. In past lives, I've worked for Wayport as a Senior Systems Architect, UUNET Technologies as "Manager, Systems Infrastructure", and as a senior sysadmin there before that and for UMIACS at The University of Maryland
You can look at my resume, too, although I'm not actively looking for work.
I'm a unix-geek
I listen to National Public Radio extensively -- most of the time to Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Marketplace (while the latter isn't NPR, it's still public radio program). I usually listen to these on WAMU, at American University. On weekends I listen to A Prarie Home Companion (I guess because I live slightly offcenter from the middle of nowhere in Loudoun County , Virginia :-)
I like to cook. A lot. People come from around the world to enjoy my new and interesting inventions in the kitchen. OK, maybe that's The Iron Chefs Maybe one day I'll draw up a web site with some of the interesting things I prepare. My favorite things to create are breads and desserts. I started a page on candies I've made. It remains to be seen if I will keep the page up or not, though.
I don't make too much time for TV, but I'm a recent (early 2004) convert to The West Wing, and have been frantically catching up through the past seasons on Bravo. I'm also a big fan of Good Eats
In the warmer months I spent a lot of time (1-2 hours a day on my better days) Rollerblading on the trail from Purcellville to Leesburg
I'm an avid music listener, [almost] all styles. Take a look at my Music page, or maybe my CD Collection. In recent times I've been particularly fond of Jazz, Electronic Music and Chick singers.
I watch movies sometimes, and have a laserdisc player, and a few laserdiscs. As you may have guessed, if I'm viewing films, I go out and watch them in full mac-daddy surround sound mode. I just got a new reciever, an Onkyo. . and a DVD player too. Here's a list of my DVDs. Apparently, you need to manufacter laserdiscs yourself if you want them, anymore.
I used to have quite the long hair, which is pretty much gone now, but you can vote for which look you like better.
When I'm not working, I'm reading, driving my car, hanging out with friends, sampling spirits, and fitting in an occasional bit of sleep scattered here and there -- usually not enough. (the typical (!) life of a computer geek :-) I guess I also end up spending a lot of time fiddling with things on or around my house, catching up on whatever TiVo has recorded for me, and playing Civilization III.
I am an equal opportunity consumer of good alcohol. I don't waste my time, or my brain cells on crappy stuff. However, when available, I'll consume Guinness Sapphire and Tonics (I'll begrudgingly settle for Tanqueray and Tonic if that's all that's available -- gin and juice!), and a variety of wine (most whites and reds, but NO white zinfandel. (One day, maybe I'll make a "wines I like/have had" web page. we'll see!). I'm also a big fan of micro-brews and generally obscure beers. When I'll have time I'll probably brew my own beer.
I like to travel a lot, and go places, so I've started keeping a list of trips I've taken. There's some pictures and a few links, and outdated, like most of the things you find on the web. I've been to a number of places within driving ability of the Washington, DC area (ie, the east coast out through the middle of the US), as well as one cross country trip. A blast. I'm trying to manage a trip up to Maine again, soon.
In my day, I have been known to jump out of perfectly good airplanes. Yes, I've been a Skydiver. My jumps awere at been at Skydive Virginia, in Louisa Country, Virginia It's a wonderful sport with indescribable amount excitement, When you land on the ground, you come away with a permanent smile. I recommend anyone who's thought about trying it to do so.
I'm a big fan of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. I've stuck in a quote from the movie Mitchell (#512) of Tom Servo doing the Disco thing. Too bad it's not on much anymore.
The song that gives me the willies every time I hear its lyrics.
Have you ever wondered what happens when you pit an acura integra against a toll booth bar that neglected to go up?

The Geek in me

To satiate my need-to-be-geeky, I use a fair and balanced combination of:

saidin, a 1Ghz Athalon, running NetBSD-1.6 beta, my main desktop
saidar, a 2.8GHz P4, running Windows XP, my other desktop.
guinness, A 1 Ghtz Athalon, running NetBSD. This is my general services machine.
slivovice, A 2.4 Ghz p4 running NetBSD. It's my desktop in my office in the Czech Republic.
tarvalon, A Pentium Pro/200 Full [White] Tower. I bought this in March, 1997 and it is up and running Unix by-way-of NetBSD-current.
tinker or ogier, A Pentium 4/2.2 Ghz that doubles as ogier when in Windows. This is generally an extra machine that gets pushed into service as needed, though lately it's my wife's desktop so I seldom use it.
buddha, A 386DX/33 (running NetBSD). This machine is often off and generally just sits there like most buddhas.
defiant, A Celeron/333 running Linux, Redhat for now.
sapphire, A Sun Ultra 5, running NetBSD. This box serves as a general services machine for omniscient.com
goofball, A Sun Sparc 20, running NetBSD. This box serves as a kdc until I can figure out why the kdc won't work on an sparc64 machine.
saa, A Sun Ultra 10 running NetBSD. I mostly just build NetBSD-current on this box.
spork, A Sun Ultra 5 running Solaris.
lapdance, my laptop, an IBM A31
naeblis, A P4/1Ghz serving as a domain controller
myrddraal, A Pentium/II serving as a windows domain controller.
surly, an SGI Indigo 2, running Irix 6.5.something-or-other, hopefully to be retired and running NetBSD soon.
An Amiga 2000, with no network connection that I have yet to name.
My little network at home hooked up to the net by-way-of a t1.
My very own domain, omniscient.com, and for the vanity of it kover.com, just because I can.
My favorite programming lanagage is C, though I use Perl, or Shell depending on the task I'm coding for. I probably use others for special tasks, but one of those three usually covers it.

Miscellaneous ramblings...

A little story about "modern Texas", and their reaction to the BSD daemon.
If you have any comments or suggestions about this page, you're welcome to mail me, and I'll consider them.
IT IS THE BREAST OF TIMES, IT IS THE WORST OF TIMES: Anya Pencheva, a leading actress with the National Theatre of Bulgaria, says it's time for people to stop worrying about the economic crisis there. Therefore, she is going to put a plaster cast of her breasts on display in her theater in Sofia. "I was fed up with constant comments on the currency board so I said one day let's talk busts instead of boards," she said. "It is a pity to focus everything on the board when there are such beautiful breasts around." (Reuter) ...That's what I always say. -from excerpts from THIS is TRUE for 8 December 1996

A plethora of Links...

Visit Staff World, or The Groovy Lounge
Archtecture/Vendors Hot list
Celebrity Prank Phone Calls -eBaumsworld.com
Know Your Schitt
The Kevin Bacon Game
Links I've taken the time to segregate into sub pages....
Maryland Students for the Exploration and Development of Space
Since this really is mainly about getting information across, some lynx links:
- Dehanced for Lynx
- Ode to Lynx
Secular Web Page
Skydiving...
- Skydive Virginia
- U.S. Parachute Association
Secular Web Page
National Speed Trap Registry.
Totally useless world wide web pages!
Mentos scares me, especially those commercials. There is a Mentos FAQ for those on a quest for more information about them.
Have you seen what happens when you google for miserable failure? The same thing happens when you google for failure.
Documents every American should be familiar with:

I use a real man's mail handler based on mh, nmh

Other Home Pages...

Here are links to some of the people I know with web pages:

Charlie Amos

Chris Capozzoli

Mike "nulspace" Chang

This page is always in a constant state of evolution, and I occasionally find time to actually make changes here, so keep looking here for festive and exciting changes! (okay, maybe not exciting or festive, but changes anyway...)

Todd Kover, kovert@omniscient.com

$Date: 2008/08/21 19:25:14 $

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