My Latest Additions

Here's a small 'photo album', mostly of shots from Christmas in California, but also one of the cats looking particularly cute, and one of some wildflowers in Vermont.

With the new camera, I've gotten some much nicer shots,... some wildflowers at the Quabbin Reservoir, some Woody Nightshade growing in our yard, and of course, the roses. Also, a feathered visitor enjoying the spray from the garden hose's leaky joint. Now I've got a page exclusively of rose photographs for your enjoyment, as well.

Who am I?

My name is Chris Lawrence Amshey, although all my ID's say Christopher L. Amshey. I graduated from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Computer Science in June of 1996, and have worked in a variety of positions since then, as you can see on my resume, all in software - mostly real-time and embedded - in support, development, and quality assurance.

Web pages must talk about web pages!

This page is, obviously, no longer hosted on some obscure isp page but has it's own domain and everything! I think of this page as being chris.amshey.net, but that's only one way to find it. At the moment the www domain-names go to my page, and the 'index' page is at amshey.net (and .org, and .com... ), because the only member of my family with his own web page is my uncle, Lawrence O'Sullivan. Being from my mother's side, the naming wouldn't work out to sensibly to put him on amshey.net! (Though I do get my middle name from his first name, but I don't have those domains...)

And, of course, my friends Diana and Eli have their own domain (beechhaven.net) too, currently hosted on this selfsame machine, though I expect that when they get a chance they'll be moving it to their own house.

Pictures!

I've discovered the fun of 'ray-tracing,' a way of modelling physical objects and then generating images of them. The banner on this page and my mpeg of dancing chess pieces are examples of what I've done. Both were originally done on a 20 Mhz 386 running Debian Linux, though since then I've upgraded (several times!), though I still haven't replaced the banner on this page... perhaps I should do that next time I break out the raytracer!

Arisia

When I'm not working with computers, playing with computers, or fixing computers, I waste some of my remaining time with fan organizations for various hobbies, the greatest time-waster (but, also a lot of fun, I admit... ) of which is certainly the Arisia science-fiction convention, in which I have held several positions including Convention Treasurer and Head of Events. This year (as of this writing...) I'm taking easy, though... next year, we'll see.

Anime!

I also made time to found an organization called The UMass Japanese Manga and Animation Society, or UMJAMS. The idea of a UMass anime club, and the name, came from Suzanne Palmer, but it took someone as crazy as me to fight with the SGA bureaucracy and make it a reality. Now that they have a web page, you can go to them to find out any details, 'cause I've been graduated long enough not to know anymore.

Links

Here's some of the places on the net that I go (or once went) often:

• Search Engines
  • Google!
  • That's it. Just google.
  • There used to be other search engines, once upon a time.
• My Stuff
  • News Page
  • My Resume
  • 'Chess Dance' MPEG
• Friends and Relatives and Their Stuff
  • Diana and Eli at Beechhaven
  • The Fuzcat ;)
  • Lawrence O'Sullivan
• Linux Stuff
  • Debian GNU/Linux
  • The Linux.org Page
  • The Linux.com Page
• Java
  • Java Tutorial Start or Table of Contents
• HTML
  • The Bare Bones Guide to HTML
  • W3C HTML Validator