Salutations.
I'm not quite sure why you're here. I'm rarely here, and this is my practically never-updated home page; my recent pictures get uploaded to my Flickr gallery (no disk quotas or gallery management issues that way); and what minimal ramblings I post tend to be on my Facebook profile, and there's also my profile on LinkedIn. If you happened to have run across me earlier, and were looking for contact information, well, there's that. I've also wandered various other online fora; while I haven't bothered with slashdot.org for aeons, I have been a somewhat active poster on fark.com and occasionally on the web forums relating to games that I've been either playing or investigating -- notably at Shrapnel Games.
The picture to the right is a few years old, but is still reasonably accurate.
Brief description
The odds seem likely that you found this page by searching for my name, in which case you probably already know me or are going to shortly, but perhaps that's not true for your particular case. So...
- Believes self to be human, but might merely be a butterfly dreaming that he's a human.
- Geek... but not a web design guru, obviously.
- Secular, minarchist tendencies, with a preference for consistency over expediency.
- Slightly anachronistic. My CSS should be causing your browser to display this in very retro, easy-to-read amber and green, for instance.
- Geek subspecies: computer science, with a particular interest in the more practical sides of algorithms.
- Reading habits are a bit of a random walk. I tend to read serious books and watch silly movies. Most of the books in my apartment, and some that came to mind but that I don't have with me, have been entered on my 'iRead' application section on Facebook.
- Academic trajectory: Franklin Regional to a long stint at Carnegie Mellon.
- Industrial trajectory: as per work.html, AOL to Chai Labs.
Work-related plug: see moviezen.com, a multilingual (aside from English, there's Hindi, Tamil and Telugu pages) for information on movies and related celebrities and so forth.
Assorted interests
- Photography is a fairly significant hobby. I used to photograph squirrels excessively often, but the ones near me are pretty scared of people and thus have forced me to branch out a bit.
- These days, my reading patterns suggest interests in history and applied psychology -- economics, advertising, political systems and the like. Among the fiction section, Camus and Chandler feature pretty heavily in my collection.
- Definite news addict.
- I've also spent a fair bit of time gaming, although I've never bothered to buy a console. Sins of a Solar Empire is fairly interesting for an RTS, for instance; Dominions 3 is a very nifty turn-based strategy game.
Random resources
Information is power. Empower yourself.
- factcheck.org -- Annenberg Political FactCheck
- OpenSecrets.org -- the Center for Responsive Politics's site on political funding.
- news.google.com -- Google News; good news aggregator.
- npr.org -- National Public Radio. Find a station near you... and support it.
- nytimes.com -- The NYT is still one of the better newspapers out there.
- snopes.com -- Snopes.com is well-known for writing on urban legends.
- wikipedia.org -- Wikipedia is not a primary source, and is somewhat vulnerable to vandalism, but it is a good resource for finding primary sources and discussion thereof.