Ken Raeburn's home page

Hi.

I'm a software engineer. I'm working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology currently, developing and maintaining Kerberos software.

Me, background info

I went to school at MIT, and worked there for a while, first as an undergrad and later as a regular staff member. I worked on Kerberos and Zephyr, among other things, while I was there. I was involved with the SIPB (including two years as chairman), and still wander by there now and then. I also worked with the Lecture Series Committee for a while. More recently, I've been involved with the Gilbert & Sullivan Players, usually being House Manager for one show or another.

I went to work at Cygnus Solutions (which has since been absorbed by Red Hat). I worked on GCC, GAS, Binutils, and KerbNet (a Kerberos-based offering) in my time there. I left when the Massachusetts office was "downsized", and after a while, started working at MIT again.

I enjoy listening to music, mostly (but not always) soft rock. One of my favorite artists is Alan Parsons. Between his work with "The Alan Parsons Project" and his work on albums by other artists, Parsons has produced a number of my favorite songs. I find some of his concept albums interesting -- sometime intriguing, sometimes amusing -- from his first, based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe, to the next-to-most recent album, On Air, focussing on air and space travel, from Dedaelus to the Challenger shuttle. (Haven't listened to Time Machine much yet.) I got to see Parsons live when he performed in Boston a few years ago.

Depending on my mood, I also like Phil Collins, Enya, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Tom Lehrer, and Stephen Sondheim, among others.

I also like reading some sci-fi and fantasy. My current favorites are Anne McCaffrey, David Weber, and James P. Hogan, especially, most recently, Weber's Honor Harrington series.

Lately -- since at least 1996, I guess -- I've been experimenting with using the Dvorak keyboard layout, rather than the standard "QWERTY" layout. I don't know if my typing speed has picked up any, and I haven't really been trying, but I do think it has reduced my hand and finger motion while typing, which is probably good since I had problems with tendonitis some time ago.

I enjoy Chinese food... well, what some Americans think of as spicy Chinese food, I'm not sure what anyone raised in China thinks of it. My favorite restaurant is a Mandarin/Szechuan place in Central Square in Cambridge, called Mary Chung's. I've been to a few other good ones too. Lilac Blossom in Nashua, NH is good, as are Jing Jing and Queen House in the Mountain View/Palo Alto area in CA.

Ken Raeburn / raeburn at mit dot edu

Last updated ....