More About Me (or How to Cure Insomia)

Who is this Kevin W. Wall character and why do I want to know? Well, I'm clueless as to the answer to the second part (but you might try this for help). However, I can try to answer more of the first.

Background
I went to undergraduate school and graduated with a BS degree in physics and math (double major) before most of you probably were born. (No, this was after quantum mechanics was discovered. I'm not that old!) I originally wanted to get a PhD in some field of quantum physics, but when I heard my physics professor discussing a former student who had a PhD in physics and who was trying a cab in NYC. He said "physicists are a dime a dozen right now", so I decided to pursue a graduate degree in applied math instead. However, I quickly became disillusioned with grad school and left after 2 quarters to take a job at (then) AT&T Bell Labs as a Senior Technical Assistant. I ended up working there for 17 years, starting as a UNIX system administrator, then doing UNIX kernel programming, then systems programming and tool development, and a smattering of other things. I left as a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff when AT&T broke up into AT&T, Lucent, and NCR.

From there, I started my own consulting company doing C++ and Java development and did that for about 3.5 years. I also spent 6 months at an Internet .Bomb company. (I was expecting to stay longer, but they decided that they wanted to be a non-profit company [not the 501(3)(c) kind] and filed for bankruptcy shortly after I joined.)

Eventually, I ended up at Qwest where I lead an Application Security team within IT. There we mostly focused on deploying an identity management system and developing Java and .NET class libraries to assist developers with encryption and other aspects of writing secure code. More recently (Jan. 2011), I switched to an Information Security group under Risk Management where I do things like security evaluations, pen testing, and threat modeling.

What I Am Doing Now
I spend lots of time watching sports, reading, and contributing to the OWASP ESAPI project and a few other OWASP projects.

Most of my time is spent reading technical books related to computers (especially programming languages), physics, and math. Occasionally I will read a novel (mostly SciFi). I am currently reading Arthur C. Clarke's and Frederik Pohl's The Last Theorem.