Hello!

You have somehow managed to find Ken Smith's Homepage. That probably means you are spending way too much time Websurfing and need to look into other things to do with your time. Though I suppose there are a few other reasons you may have clicked your way here, we'll get to that later.

Thanks to Davin Milun I have managed to avoid needing to do anything related to The Web until recently. But now that he's gone to work for Juno one of the things I have inherited is the job of Webmaster. Having a Webmaster who hasn't bothered to learn enough HTML to make his own Homepage is probably a Bad Thing (®). So...

This page will be embarrasingly sparse for a while, and slowly added to as I need to test stuff. But rest assured it's being written from scratch in raw HTML edited with vi (the One True Editor). No help from any of those HTML editors or "Web Site Management" packages that some Quiche Eater would use! But that's just this homepage where I need to learn as much as possible about raw HTML. I get to use one of those Site Management Packages for the main Departmental site.

Since I know about as much HTML as I know Swahili (well, OK - I probably know about as much HTML as I know French now...) at the moment I've been finding this reference very useful (and put it here so I don't need to go digging for it while I'm working on this Web page :-).

Why are you here?

My first guess at why you are reading this is that you are spending way too much time Websurfing and need to find something else to occupy your time with. There are lots of really cool hobbies you could look into (back when I had time for hobbies I really enjoyed Woodworking). Or maybe reading books(remember those?).

There are a few reasons other than that you may have clicked your way here though I suppose. See if any of these fit the bill:

You wanted to know who this kensmith guy was that created a computer account for you on a CSE system and sent you email about it. A little background about me is below in the Who Am I? section.
You were thinking about taking CSE411 and/or CSE422 and wanted to learn more about the Instructor. I have been using the "DCSL" Web Site to do some of my Web learning as well so information about the courses is on my DCSL Web Site.
You arranged for a Short Course through the CSE Department and were told I was the Instructor. Sorry but I don't have any information about the Short Courses I teach on the Web yet.

Who Am I?

I'd like to think that question can't be completely answered by a Web page... I work for the CSE Department at The University at Buffalo as a Computer Systems Administrator. As part of the job I wind up doing a pretty wide variety of things related to the operation of the computer systems for the Department. I have done everything from basic running of network cabling to advanced programming inside the computer Operating Systems (and pretty much everything in between). Most of my time goes to handling computer account issues, software installation, fixing broken or finicky hardware, network management, and routine maintenance like watching over backups. Less of my time goes to working on semi-interesting support program development, setting up nifty new stuff for researchers, etc. I used to need to deal with the Personal Computers running Windows and MacOS but thankfully the Department recently hired two staff members for Windows support to handle those instead (I much prefer Unix...). Fairly recently I got the job of Webmaster as well as my previous jobs of Postmaster, Hostmaster, etc...

In addition to the regular day job doing Systems Administration I teach two courses for the CSE Department. In the Fall semester I teach CSE411 which is a basic introduction to Computer Systems Administration. During the Spring semester I teach CSE422 where the students get a chance to do programming inside the UNIX kernel.

I was born in Niagara Falls, Ontario too long ago for me to want to tell you when. We moved to Columbus Georgia the year I started high school, and then to Tonawanda, New York the following year. After finishing high school at Sweet Home High School I started University here at UB as an Electrical Engineering major and I've been here ever since. My student life ended with a Masters in Electrical Engineering, though I had started working as a staff member a year or so before I completed the degree.

While working on my Masters Degree I managed to court and marry my wife Helene. She currently works for Goldman Sachs in New York City, commuting between Buffalo and New York (and yes, she was in New York on September 11th 2001). We have one daughter named Julia, and one dog named Taylor (though Julia is always trying to con us into more pets...).

I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed if you expected to find a picture of me here. I hate having my picture taken, so I'm not about to post one on the Web. At some point I'll put some pictures of other things (like Helene and Julia) here but that's a future project...