Periodically I'm asked to provide a bio for something or other. It's a lot easier to whip some up something relevant if I keep all of the previous ones handy.
Copyrighters
I live in Wellington and work for Weta Digital as the manager of the infrastructure team. In general I've made my living doing technical work based around Linux and open source. I've started two companies, Earthlight Communications (an ISP in Dunedin) and The Personal Telco Project (a nonprofit in Portland, Oregon).
IBM Developer Works
Adam has been working as a system administrator and team lead since the early nineties when he founded one of the first ISPs in New Zealand. In 1997 he moved to America and spent eight years working as a system administrator and team lead for for a variety of .com's, including one of the largest ISPs in the world. In 2000 he founded a non-profit organisation dedicated to providing free wireless internet by partnering with local communities. Most recently he has moved back home to New Zealand where he has been running the infrastructure team for Peter Jackson's visual effects company, Weta Digital.
TUANZ
In 1993 Adam started the first ISP in his home town of Dunedin. In 1997 he moved to America and spent eight years working as a Unix system administrator and team lead for for a variety of .com's, including one of the largest ISPs in the world. In 2000 he founded a non-profit organisation dedicated to providing free wireless internet access by working with local communities. Five years ago he moved back home and has been working in the IT department at Weta Digital doing a mixture of technical and management work.
Unlimited Potential
Adam was born in England but grew up moving back and forth between New Zealand and California. In 1993 he started Dunedin's first commercial ISP and then headed off to measure himself against the world. He spent three years in Alaska working for one of the largest ISPs in North America and another three years in Oregon where he built his first Linux cluster for a semiconductor design company. While he was in Oregon he founded Personal Telco, a non-profit which worked with local communities to provide free wireless internet access to the public. Five years ago he moved to Wellington to work for Weta Digital where he's been doing a mixture of management and technical work.
NetApp Corporate
Adam has been an enthusiastic customer of Network Appliance hardware and software since 1998. Most recently he was the Operations Manager at Weta Digital where he utilized Network Appliance gear to provision over 100TB of storage for Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" and "King Kong" movies. He has implemented Network Appliance products in both Unix and Windows environments, and for business critical, high performance and development environments.
Constant State of Flux
I am one of those sad yuppies who once believed in the purity of truly fucking things up but is slowly decending towards the banality of middle-age and thoughts of children. On the plus side I have done some work that I'm actually proud of.
Interests:
- The concept of adhocracy is slowly consuming my previous belief in the purity of anarchy. Primarily due to the fact that adhocracies might actually be able to achieve their goals.
- Being a media whore (though whoring duties have been largely delegated to Nigel Ballard).
- Dinking with knowledge and content management systems.
- A perpetual desire (with matching inability to act) to become a better programmer.
- Taking pictures.
- Pretending that I'm anonymous online.
- Learning to sing, play the guitar and bang my djembe (which is not a euphamism).
- Converting the internet to Wiki, one one page at a time.
Linux Conference Australia
In 1993 Adam started the first ISP in his home town of Dunedin, New Zealand. Since then he has worked as a Unix system administrator and team lead for several ISP's, both large and small. In 2000 he founded the non-profit Personal Telco Project, one of the largest community wireless groups in North America. For the last couple of years he's been doing research and development for Weta Digital's IT team. He is a long time Linux and Free Software bigot and a recent fan of Macintosh OS X.
Defcon X
Adam started PersonalTelco in November 2000 due to a happy series of coincidences. He believes that information wants to be free despite the fact that people want to be paid.
Source: http://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-10/defcon-10-speakers.html
O'Reilly Emerging Technology
Adam Shand founded the Personal Telco Project back in November 2000. During that time he has been helping build the infrastructure to support a community maintained, metropolitan area wireless network in Portland Oregon. Since it's inception Personal Telco has grown to more than 400 people with over 30 active nodes and has the beginnings of a "wireless cloud". Many others have helped and to them he is eternally grateful.
Source: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pub/w/18/speakers.html
Defcon 9
In 1993 Adam started the first ISP in his home town of Dunedin New Zealand. Since then he has worked for several ISP's, small and large, in various capacities, mostly as a UNIX systems administrator. His current project is Personal Telco which is trying to leverage consumer grade 802.11b gear to build internet accessible neighborhood communities.
Source: http://www.defcon.org/html/defcon-9/defcon-9-speakers.html