about me / contact
![[climbing mt. tam]](/mt_tam.png)
whoami
Stephen Lau, or just plain stevel. i was born an Englishman, in Aldershot. i’m now living in silicon valley in the beautiful bay area, california. raised in los altos, i went to los altos high (surprise), before moving on and spending six great years in san diego, SoCal, getting my BS and MS degrees in computer science. my thesis research studied the usefulness of proxy communication threads in enabling overlap of communication with computation on multi-tier SMP machines. boring? maybe to you… but it was two and a half years of my life i’m never getting back, so it warrants a mention here.
whatdoido?
i’m the developer advocate doing… guess what, developer relations/outreach/evangelism. i work at Pioneers of the Inevitable, a.k.a. Songbird. i’m trying to help build out a rockin’ open source developer community. i also meet and work with customers and partners to help them figure out what they can build on top of or with Songbird. part of my responsibilities also involve building cool extensions and add-ons to Songbird to help fulfill user-requested features and “be disruptive”. i’ve authored the mashTape, SHOUTcast, and Concert Ticketing add-ons to name a few. (click on any of those 3 links to see an exhaustive list of the add-ons i’ve developed)
i’m a huge open source advocate, and currently serve on the first openly-elected OGB (OpenSolaris Governing Board), the board elected to serve and lead the OpenSolaris Community. after my first term on the OGB, i was re-elected to serve a second term.
before Songbird, i worked at Sun Microsystems. specifically, i was part of the OpenSolaris engineering team facilitating the open-sourcing of Solaris. i also worked on kernel performance projects trying to ensure the Solaris kernel kicks butt as much as possible. prior to OpenSolaris, i spent 2 years with the Solaris kernel test development team learning to poke my way around Solaris.
outside of work, my main pleasures in life are playing with my beagle Char-siu (the other beagle in those photos was my older beagle, Isis, who passed away in March 2008), ultimate frisbee, rock climbing, snowboarding, and the occasional mountain biking.
i love watching FIFA football. i follow Manchester United, and the English national team with a passion.
privacy?
i use GPG (GnuPG), a GPL implementation of the OpenPGP standard for signing, verifying, and encrypting data. you can request my public key from keyservers with the keyID 0×09E5CD21 or you can download it directly. if you don’t use it, you should think about starting. 
ping?
Stephen Lau
(
Oakland,
CA
)
- email me at steve at grommit dot com
- IM me on icq at 1948634
- IM me on aim at oOdonutholeOo
- IM me on msn at msn@grommit.com
- IM me on yahoo! at kaesefleisch
- IM me on google talk at donuthole@gmail.com
- skype me at oodonutholeoo
- I’m on the following IRC networks:
