What I look like
Some time ago, I read, likely on one of Jakob Nielsen's alertbox articles that when designing a web site, your readers want to know who you are. They are not really interested in what you are, but what you look like is of prime importance to reduce the impersonality of the web. So here you go, bmt, your faithful webmaster:
wed 2003-10-22
Short bio
bmt was born in the night of Tuesday September 19th 1978, in Tours, France.
Due to his parent's work constraints, he soon moved to several places including Chateauroux, the tiny island of St-Pierre-et-Miquelon—twenty miles off the coast of Newfoundland—, Lyon and Nantes. These early travels gave him a pronounced taste for exploring the world and going to random places.
His centers of interest, besides traveling and immersing himself in other cultures include:
- LEGOs—of which there are four crates at his parent's home—thanks to which he discovered multiplication at age 5, finding out that on that particular brick with 3x2 plots there was a total of 6 plots. Mmmhhh...
- Comic books, on which he learned to understand funny jokes through pictures long before he learned how to read. Of course, he was blessedly raised in one of the temples of comics and graphic novels: french-speaking Europe.
- Computers, on which he had enjoyed programming, be it in BASIC, assembly or C since he first owned a Commodore 64 in the early '80s.
- Playing the piano, which he has done for more than 12 years, and he wishes he would keep doing...
- Motorcycling, which he has been enjoying on and off—off being while his license was suspended—since early 2001.
In 1998, he entered a telecommunication engineering school,
ENST de
Bretagne, where he managed to satisfy his traveling cravings.
After a year and a half of rainy Breton
weather, he finally left
for better skies, first moving to Madrid, Spain, where he stayed
and studied for six months, while on an exchange semester with
ETSIT de Madrid.
Following the madrilene journey, he had the opportunity to spend a full year in California while on an internship at a Silicon Valley based company. There, he also met love, for better or for worse. After a short interlude in the deserts of Central Morocco, he bounced to another exchange semester in the UK, at Aston University in Birmingham. Finally, he spent his master's project in Guadalajara, Mexico, thanks to an exchange programme sponsored by his french school.
He finally returned to California in 2002, following the love mentionned above. The particularly bad state of the economy, combined with his unattractive—at least as far as hiring companies are concerned—immigration status, let him looking for a job for roughly a year. In May 2003, he made the big step and married his love interest—which incidentally solved the latter job seeking issue.
In the summer of 2003, his networking efforts finally paid off, and he joined a budding startup, nexB. After five months however, he had managed to single handedly empty the company's cash reserves, and, having bills to pay and a wife to support, he moved on.
In 2004, he therefore joined Sigma Designs, a multimedia processor maker. There he first worked on supporting the toolchain for the company's hardware, then moved on to implement AACS, the Blu-Ray DVD copy protection system.
In the spring of 2007, getting itchy, he sought the opportunity to join Apple and develop FairPlay, the iTunes store proprietary DRM solution.
created: tue 2002-12-31
updated: fri 2009-02-05
Legal
Everything on this site is my creation, and therefore, I own full copyright to it. However, this only really means is that I am free to decide what to do with my copy rights.
Traditionally, there were two approaches of how to handle those rights:
all
or nothing
. All
is something like All rights
reserved. Copy, distribution, reproduction, etc. are forbidden without
the express written permission of the copyright holder, who anyways is
the publishing house and they won't ever give such rights to a punk like
you.
Not very encouraging, is it? On the other hand, nothing
is
something like I hereby relinquish all rights to this work and put it
in the public domain for anyone to do whatever they wish with it.
Again,
this is a bit too much.
Creative commons is
an organization whose goals is to build a layer of reasonable copyright
,
that is, acknowledge that copyright laws give an author a set of rights,
and the freedom to decide which ones she wants to enforce.
Thus, I have decided to place the whole content of bmt-online under a Creative Commons license that lets everyone free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work and also to make derivative works, provided that they give me credit, don't use it for commercial purposes and distribute derivative work under the same license.
These rights and conditions are embodied in the Creative Commons tag, and associated metadata, that appear in the footer of every page on the site.
When clicking on the Some rights reserved
button, you are taken to a
layman's description of the license, from which you can also access the true,
lawyer-readable license.
sat 2004-03-20