Andrei D. Caraman

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I'm a Computer Science engineer, specialized in Unix administration and TCP/IP networking. I graduated from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest in 1997. I am a lover of art (when I can understand it), of fine cuisine (but alas! not a great cook). I am a hater of stupidity (and hence I sometimes hate myself :-) and a hater of hatered (life is so short...).

I was born in Romania and I've been living there for about 29 years. I moved to Canada in 2001.

After moving to Canada I lived in Oakville, Kanata and Toronto, all in Ontario. I now live and work in Oshawa, ON, Canada.

Expectedly, I do IT for a living. I'm pretty good with Unix, TCP/IP networks and related stuff (including MS Windows). (But I do believe that some day Linux will dominate the world :-). My consulting company is UNIP Consulting Ltd.

In my spare time I enjoy (among many others) playing bridge, playing table tennis, dancing (I want to re-start Tango classes at the Club Milonga), reading (an incomplete list of titles in my collection -- my poetry page), and doing fun stuff with my Linux running computers. I don't play as much as I used to with my Canon Digital Ixus V camera (some of the better shots are still online, but I've found something else that's lots more fun: amateur acting. I'm a member (founding one, no less!) of the Romanian Majestic Theatre in Toronto. You may have seen us in such plays as ``Titanic vals'', ``Steaua fara nume'' and ``Escu''.

Bridge

I used to maintain Floater Mania, a site that complements Geoff Pike's Floater site. For those who still don't know what this is about, here's a tip: Floater is a software that enables you to play free duplicate bridge on the Internet. I sort of lost my interest in Floater, but not in (online) bridge: I now play on BBO

Table tennis (pingpong)

I'm an avid table tennis player, although of only average level. I sometimes play at the Pickering Table Tennis Club.

Computer stuff

HTML/HTTP tricks:

• My Sunoco gas price finder doesn't work anymore, as Sunoco doesn't publish price info on their website anymore. Believe it or not, it used to be very popular in the old days.

SQL programming

• The Floater results reporting interface on Floater Mania is not available anymore. It was powered by a PostgreSQL engine and a bunch of Perl scripts, and produced some nice reports. With the little action that Floater sees these days, I dropped that project in favour of more interesing pastimes.