Hello, my name is Allan Feid. I'm from East Hanover, a suburban town in New Jersey. I'm currently enrolled as a Network Security student at the University of Advancing Technology (UAT). It was a pretty big move for me to go almost 2,400 miles away from home to start my education. I've always been a fan of technology and never really knew what part of that field to go into. I was always hacking my own systems to get them to do what I want through-out middle school and high school. Though at the time, I did not know a whole lot about the networking or security part I figured that was going to be the best field to go into. With the way things are today, everything runs on computers and security is becoming more and more of an issue. Without securing your network, you are at risk of leaking out private data from your company or even worse, you could leak private customer data.

During my spare time, I enjoy listening to all kinds of music. Primarily the classic rock groups such as Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. I also like listening to jam bands such as moe. and Umphrey's McGee. I like a wide range of music from Daft Punk to Slightly Stoopid and everything in between. These days it's so easy to explore different music there's no reason to stick to one genre. As far as hobbies go, I play the bass guitar and often jam with whoever is around and is willing to play. Web design and coding is also a side hobby but I don't really get to do those as often as I'd like.

I have always been interested in the programming aspect of computers, as well as the networking portion. To me a Software Engineering degree that focused on securing networks seemed to be the perfect match. The only school I could find that offered this kind of flexibility was UAT. While I'm still a student here I do plan to graduate in about 2 more semesters (Summer 2009). I've already had two jobs in the IT world. One at a call center doing tech support for an ISP and the other was an internship at an IT outsourcing company. The call center job did teach me great fundamentals in network troubleshooting, however, the IT outsourcing company was one of the best jobs I've had so far. I learned a ton there and wrote all kinds of little scripts to use on various daily tasks.

Working for IND Corp taught me many things that you wouldn't learn in an academic environment. For example, in the field people say "wack wack" when referring to "\\." This is something you often type when accessing a network share (ex: \\fileserver\share) and the first time I heard it I had no idea what they were talking about. One of my coworkers explained and now I use it when telling others where something is located on the network. Also while interning there, I wrote a few VBScripts to do basic daily tasks such as collecting server maintenance information or backing up important files before migrating or rebuilding a users workstation. During my time there, tools like RDP and VNC were invaluable in doing work from a remote location and decreased the amount of travel needed. There's not a whole lot you need to be on site to do work for. My time at IND was definitely a memorable and entertaining one.

My goal in life is to obtain a nicely paying job doing things I love. This may sound difficult to most people, but I truly enjoy working with computers. On a daily basis I tend to play around on my multiple computers to see what kind of things I can accomplish. I'm always trying out the latest software and been using Ubuntu Linux as my OS of choice for quite some time now. Windows may be easy to configure and use for Server environments, but when it comes to pure customization abilities and price nothing beats a *nix server environment.

Well that about sums everything up, please go ahead and check out my projects and resume!