Carl Fandel's Home Page

Carl's Home Page

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Welcome to my homepage.

Hello and welcome to my homepage. I would first like to thank my brother, The Cranky Engineer, and the fine folks of DFMM.org for providing space for this site. And now, on to the important bits, where I talk about me. Yes, me, me, me. That's right, I'm dedicating this whole site to a discussion of myself. And what better place than a website that's got my name in the title. So if you're here, you must want to know more about me, and I encourage you to read on. Heck, maybe even print this stuff out and hand it around to other people.

What am I doing now?

Well, currently I am living in Northern California some 40 miles north of San Francisco along Highway 101. I have been helping my girlfriend/Significant Other/etc work on her house. I have so far (in no particular order): dug a trench for septic piping, rebuilt part of a deck and steps, replaced just about every electrical receptacle imaginable, run irrigation piping and installed valves and timers, repaired several appliances, dug a drainage channel and small reservoir, uprooted several oak trees, pruned fruit, oak and plane trees, built a greenhouse, rewired the well pump, organized the garage, sanded and sealed the garage, recaulked the tub, weeded and mulched way too much yard, put in a gravel path, built a 60-foot fence, transplanted several large bushes and a small tree, built a woodshed, and moved 4 cubic yards of topsoil to create a back garden.

In my spare time, I have been learning HTML (thus these pages) and working on learning Perl. I am currently in the process of looking for a networking job in Europe. After some research, I am looking in The Netherlands, Ireland, Germany and Belgium as those countries seem to offer the best opportunities with the least barriers of language and work permits.

How did I get here?

I had a short happy childhood and a miserable and interminable adolescence. In other words, a fairly normal life. I dutifully went off to college, starting out in Physics and ending up in Engineering after running into the weirdness of quantum mechanics. I eventually graduated with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering with minor degrees in Physics and Materials Science and Engineering. After a several fruitless months of applying for jobs in engineering firms, I applied for a position as Network Specialist at a small private college called Claremont McKenna College and got it. I didn't have much experience with networks (or frankly even with computers) but they didn't have much of a network and I learn very quickly. This began a series of networking jobs which you can learn about from my basic resume or from the expanded version.

My most recent job was working in LA for a startup dotcom. Although I learned quite a lot during my time there I eventually decided to leave because A) I was tired of the commute to see my girlfriend, B) I was getting burnt out, and C) because they had become an email advertising company to stay afloat.

Stuff I like

I really like books, and will read nearly anything in any genre. I like gaming, mostly strategy and board games (most of the good ones recently are from Germany). I like to keep up to date on the world, so I read several news publications, notably The Economist and The Christian Science Monitor. Later I'm sure that I'll think of more stuff so I don't seem quite so shallow and boring.

Well, that's it. Thanks for visiting and thanks for reading all about ME.

This page last modified by Carl Fandel on April 21, 2003