Ok I’m feeling attention starved so: one like = one fact about myself

I bought a motorcycle in grad school and rode it across Death Valley in full gear one afternoon in July. Yes, I also question my judgment.

I use a passport from a country that I haven’t lived in over 15 years. It’s also the country I’ve lived the third longest in, and I was not a citizen when I lived there.

I was treated for testicular cancer at the same hospital / team that treated Lance Armstrong. They mentioned this all the time; this was before his TdF wins were taken away.

Two of my grand* advisors received a Turing award. I used to have this theory that your advisor is as a rule smarter than you are, but I think I managed to buck this trend with some of my students.

I am responsible for the death of the rump session at not one but two of the big-four security conferences.

I have traveled to see total solar eclipses in Hungary, Zambia, Australia, Turkey, and China. Last one I saw was a 3h drive from my house (though a 12h drive back).

I dressed in drag for a midterm exam on Halloween my first year of undergrad. It worked out so well that I repeated this the remaining years, too.

I was also a founding member of the Guys In Really Lovely Skirts club at my undergraduate

I have completed two marathons, a half dozen ultramarathons, and two olympic distance triathlons. I’m out of shape right now, though, with the COVID metric 19

I went to the world finals of the ACM collegiate programming contest twice, once representing Waterloo, and losing to Berkeley, and once representing Berkeley, and losing to Waterloo. They didn’t allow me on the team after that.

I missed all but the first 20 minutes of class for my numerical analysis course in undergrad, despite that class having an in-class midterm. Pretty sure I still got an A in it.

Oh I also once got bonus points on an assignment because I slept through a part of a lecture.

In high school I ran a password cracker on my mom’s work system under her account, which got her into trouble. Given that this was not long after the Cold War, we were lucky it worked out OK in the end.

Later in high school I downloaded the dozen or so install floppies for a Linux distribution using my modem over a series of long nights. I then became Johnny Linuxseed, lending them to all my friends.

I have driven cross country-ish three times; once to go to grad school, and twice with my two infant kids and two dogs to spend a summer in California.

I decided to stop drinking when I started college. That lasted for about two and a half years, I think.

What most sold me on going to grad school was going to a prelim (really qual) study session at Berkeley where they were discussing MULTICS virtual memory.

On my second date with my future wife we spontaneously decided to take a road trip from SF to LA for the weekend. I had to cancel a movie outing I had planned with friends, telling them I had to go see about a girl

At our wedding we played a song from Katamari Damacy for a processional and had cake toppers made to look like our stuffed bear and puppy

My first summer of undergrad I fixed bugs in a compiler that was used in a course I took the following fall.

I got a student grant to go to @USENIXSecurity in ‘96 as an undergrad, and I had a wild time. I convinced Tatu Ylönen to hire me to design and implement SFTP. I was in over my head and I’m pretty sure they scrapped what I did and started from scratch.

I have moved ten times since my kids were born. They are ten.

As a kid I used to steal a loaf of bread from a bakery near my music school after my lessons. I'd have it eaten by the time I made it home. The perfect crime!

My weekend pastime those days was to borrow my mom's bus pass and then ride a random bus route and record all of the stop names in order. I had notebooks full of these.

I used to have my email forwarded to my phone via text message. Since it would only show the first 160 chars, I wrote a compression script that would remove some of the vowels, double letters, and substituted special chars for diphthongs. It was mostly illegible to anyone but me

I briefly tried smoking at 11 and didn’t like it. My parents were upset when they found my mostly full pack of cigarettes, but later there was a cigarette shortage and they were happy to have them.

I drank a lot of coke in undergrad. First year I would wake around with a 2L bottle in my hand. Later I lived with roommates who would wait for a sale and then literally fill the trunk of a car with coke.

I once won a contest for the sexiest man in the math department. In absentia.

In the days of USENET I had an http://alt.fan  newsgroup. It wasn’t always on topic but the group etiquette encouraged an ObNikita fact to be included in every post. One of my undergrad professors was a poster.

For our honeymoon we traveled up the coast of Norway on bikes, laden with our tents, sleeping bags, and clothes. It was magical but also quite hilly!

I once made a cross border run into the US with a couple friends to pick up caffeinated Mountain Dew (in Canada it has no caffeine). The border guard was really confused at first by our purpose but eventually suggested other caffeinated sodas for us to try.

I didn’t start running till my 30s and in fact did nearly no exercise until then. But it’s amazing what you can do if you keep at it. I’m not always consistent but these days half my Facebook friends are runners and they keep me motivated most of the time.

Both my parents were scientists. My dad was initially disappointed when I decided to pursue CS rather than a real science but in the end he was very excited to see me become a professor.

I once led my algebra class in a QED cheer at the end of one of the in-class proofs. We did the wave afterwards. The professor took a minute to compose himself and then went on with the lecture.

I’m a head taller than both my parents and my sister. A fact that I believe is completely unrelated is that my mother was doing research on the human growth hormone when I was a kid.

My go-to programming language has been BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, Perl, and Haskell at various times. But it’s been Python since late graduate school.

I speak English and Russian and can get by in French, but it’s pretty rusty. I’ve also taken several semesters of German and studied Japanese and Swedish on my own. And I’ve picked up bits of Spanish and Dutch through osmosis.

The first time I tried implementing RC4 I had a fun bug in the code. It would pass short test vectors but after a while it would revert to sending plaintext.

When I was in high school I came along with my mother to one of her conferences in San Diego. It was at the Catamaran.

I got my first car at 19. It was a small black sports car—Isuzu Impulse—with a backseat so tight it was the genesis of several relationships. I eventually sold it for $7.

One day my friend and I tried to see how many movies you could see in the theatre in a single day. Turns out 8. It was fun if a bit surreal.

Ok I think I’m done for today. More tomorrow! It’s been fun to reminisce but it’s also depressing how few of these fun facts I can think of in my 30s and 40s.

Oh no, more likes came in while I was sleeping! Back at it, I guess.

I once shaved my head on a bet. My ex-girlfriend kept the snipped ponytail for what I was assured were not voodoo purposes. I used my winnings to pay for the Pure Math, Applied Math, and Combinatorics and Optimization Club end-of-term dinner.

I have taught 7 different undergraduate courses at U of I, as well as a few grad ones. Again, I, too, question my judgment.

Our kids and dogs have all had four character names; in all but one case these were Japanese words

They say when writing your PhD thesis you need to decide if you’re writing to compete for a dissertation award or writing to finish. My approach was the latter, though I wish I’d put a bit more time into it because it has been cited. A reviewer even told me to cite it once!

On one of my visits to Japan I stayed overnight in a coffin hotel. It was actually pretty nice but I think there was not quite enough noise isolation from neighbors.

I’ve always had too many hobbies. Right now I’m spending my time on learning guitar; during the pandemic I also picked up gardening and woodworking but those have fallen by the wayside. In the past I’ve tried photography, knitting, and motorcycle maintenance (sans Zen).

I have significant hearing loss from chemo and I wear hearing aids. I get by reasonably well with them but noisy situations like conference receptions can be tricky. I also used to take opiates for pain from nerve damage in my feet but stopped after six months.

I never partied quite as hard or as much as I did in 1999 so that prince song has a special meaning for me.

I met a group of friends in Berkeley who would meet every Thursday to watch Babylon 5. The show ended but the group kept meeting on Thursdays for the next two decades (albeit with an updated membership). Over the last year we’ve been meeting over Zoom.

In high school I took English in summer school, to catch up to most of my other classes where I had placed ahead coming from Russia. It was a weird mix of students like me taking extra credits in the summer and students who had failed it during the school year.

I’ve taken mileage runs to Dubai and Quito. In Dubai I took a day to explore. In Quito I slept in the airport and flew right back. Got flagged at customs for that one.

I lived in Paris for 4 months when I was 12. I didn’t have much to do so I watched a lot of Le Juste Prix (French Price Is Right). Coming from the Soviet Union the show was a trip but I got really good at French numbers. I also learned programming to relieve boredom.