About "The Vulture"

	Nickname	"The Vulture"
	Real Name	Joe Votour
	Age	29
	Birthplace	Sudbury, Ontario (Canada)
	Residence	Fremont, California (USA)
	Profession	Software Engineer (C, Embedded Systems)

I was born and raised in the Sudbury area, where I remained until I went to university. There's a time and place for everything, and it's college, and my time there was no different. It was a roller coaster of ups and downs, new challenges, new scenery, new people, new points of view - I wouldn't change it for the world. Leaving home and being out on my own during those years gave me a great feeling of independence and taught me valuable lessons.

After university, I moved out to the San Francisco Bay Area, in California, and I still reside there today, five years later. It's very nice, in that I'm only about 35 miles away from CA State Route 1, along which are several beaches (well, and it's a nice drive too).

Speaking of driving, I really love driving in the countryside - well, I like highway driving too, but it's not quite the same. There's many scenic areas around here. Thus far, I have driven SR-1 from as far north as Jenner (near Petaluma), down to as far south as San Luis Obispo. I'm a road geek as well, so I have an intense fascination of things like road histories, planning, and road signage. If I was an engineer, I'd consider a job that involved those hobbies. But, it would be a tough choice, since I really love writing software.

In terms of jobs, I've worked at a few different companies here in California. The majority of what I have done is programming in C for embedded/real-time systems (vxWorks), although there's been some degree of systems adminstration/IT, website design/development and QA (Quality Assurance)/technical support. I've always been a fan of "getting down to the metal", since learning 6510 assembly in my teenage years, and that desire to make tight, fast code has spilled over into my development on cable modems. Most cable modems only have 2MB of flash ROM (only 1MB usable per code image, since two images have to fit there), and 8MB of RAM, with CPU's running in the 100-200MHz range. It's constantly a challenge to keep the image size down, and the code "lean and mean", and that forces you to evaluate some rather interesting ways to solve a problem.

I'm a big baseball fan, and living in the Bay Area, I have my choice of two major league baseball teams. I do like to watch the local teams play, but in my heart, my favorite teams are still the Montreal Expos and the Toronto Blue Jays. My musical tastes vary, but I especially like "Retro 80's" music and heavy metal. I'm a big true crime fan, and as such, watch shows like "America's Most Wanted" and "Forensic Files", and although it's not true crime, I'm also a fan of "CHiPs".