Hi, my name is Dan and I'm a child of the 80's.
I'm an assistant professor at Rice University in the department of computer science. My research generally considers computer security, and these days also wanders into other areas of computer systems (most recently, wireless in-building location systems).
I got my PhD working at Princeton University. I studied Java security, which included spending two cool summers working at Netscape and, among other things, helping design their Java security architecture, which has since influenced the Java2 architecture as well as Microsoft's C# system.
In my life outside the computer science building, I've tried all kinds of hobbies over the years, but I seem to have settled into swing dancing as my favorite thing.
I did my undergrad work at UC Berkeley, where I was a member of the Computer Science Undergraduate Association, which has quite an interesting on-and-offline social scene. Check out this paper by Tara Bloyd for some amusing details. I also spent a year living in Bowles Hall, a beautiful dorm built in 1929, directly atop the Hayward Fault. Rumble.
I went to high school at J. J. Pearce High School in Richardson, Texas. Brian Eisemann once maintained a fantastic alumni address book, but he graduated from college and it went away, although you can look at an archived copy from 2001. J. J. Pearce, itself, used to maintain another address book, but that died as well. Here's an archived copy from 2002.
Sometimes, people are amazed to find out I'm from Texas. They probably don't understand that hardly anybody in Dallas is actually from Dallas (I was born in Massachusetts).