Core Team Profiles - Ha Quach

irt.org | About | Profiles | Ha Quach

E-mail: ha@irt.org

I am the do-it-all-because-no-one-else-wants-to programmer at a 175-year-old newspaper in Fayetteville, North Carolina. I also happen to be a college dropout one class shy of a BA in Writing and two classes shy of a BS in Mathematics, holding that status now going into my third year of 'retirement' from academia. I taught a class at my local community college called 'Desktop Publishing' the semester after I was booted, the exact same class and textbook for which I received an F and was denied an eleventh-hour plea for a degree.

Fed up with the irony of life, I locked myself in a closet for a year and studied scripting languages (Javascript, Miva, Python) and a lot of Perl and just a wee bit of C. So I ended up working for the employer of the teacher who gave me the F (for you international folks, that means 'Failing', the absolute worst grade/point/mark, like a zero). The employer also happens to be a trustee at the college. More irony? Or is it all a conspiracy? Or is this town that small? I will never work in the company's New Media department because of my torrid academic history. But why did they hire me for Information Systems?

My passion is humanity. If that were a subject, I'd call it either political philosophy or Star Trek. I'm a big supporter of freedom of computing (Open Source, GNU, copyleft, all of that). I cringe at work because they plop me down in front of a bunch of NT boxes (two NT boxes, even Digital Alphas, do NOT a cluster make) and can't wait to get home and snuggle up to RYOLinux (roll your own). I'm grateful for this opportunity to share and receive your feedback as we stumble along the learning curve together. My life's work is life, not work. Remember, you teach a person, not a subject - for a lifetime.

My name is Ha Quach.

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