For the duration of the year 2021, I was part of a competitive InfoSec networking and cybersecurity training grant cohort with the Center for Cyber Security Awareness and Cyber Defense at Marquette University as the only accepted member who was not a graduate student in the Computer Science Department.
I am a proud advocate of free and open source software (FOSS), especially its implementation in academia. To that end, I have written articles for the FreeBSD Journal, contributed to the FreeBSD Wiki, and given various presentations about topics related to software freedom. Four noteworthy presentations of the kind are the talk that I delivered at the 2021 Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM) on how to optimize multisource historical research with tiling window managers, my October 2021 FreeBSD Friday lecture “The Writing Scholar’s Guide to FreeBSD,” my lecture at BSD Canada 2023 (BSDCan) that was titled “BSD for Researching, Writing, and Teaching the Liberal Arts,” and my upcoming lecture at BSDCan 2024 that will be titled “Summa Tetraodontidae [Summa of the Pufferfish]: Thomas Aquinas Explores OpenBSD’s Medieval Orderliness.”
I maintain a custom desktop configuration, which I call “Theological Dotfiles,” for efficient multi-source research and writing in *BSD or GNU/Linux. I originally wrote the dotfiles for use with spectrwm, but I currently use them with “Theology WM,” which is my own custom build of the suckless project’s dynamic window manager (dwm) (blog post pending).
I love computer building, and I used to use a home-built desktop computer for most of my work. After making a recent cross-country move, however, before which it made the most sense for me to sell my desktop computer hardware, I now use a docked ThinkPad T590 while at my desk and a freestanding ThinkPad X270 while away from my desk. See this blog post for a guide to how I have OpenBSD configured on the X270.
I have multi-year experience with Unix-like operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and GNU/Linux (especially Debian and Manjaro), as well as some shell scripting. I also have strong familiarity with Zotero, LibreOffice, and other office software; spectrwm, i3wm, Openbox, and other window managers; XFCE, LXQt, and other desktop environments; and a range of other open source tools for desktop work.
I am fond of the LaTeX typesetting language. Specifically, I enjoy the TeX Live distribution with Texmaker as my current cross-platform GUI front-end of choice for preparing both personal and professional documents.
In each of 10 summers, I lead and co-taught Build Your Own Computer Camp for middle school students at my alma mater, Marshall School in Duluth, Minnesota.
My amateur radio (vanity) callsign is N7CJS.
Also see my GitHub profile, stand-alone publication record, and blog.
Updated on March 14, 2024.