Interests

Hobbies

Music - I love music. I play a whole bunch of instruments (clarinet, piano, harmonica, various whistles); I'm mediocre at all of them. I listen to just about every kind of music there is. I've even found that I like varieties of rap and country (those dreaded two that budding music lovers tend to fear). What I don't tend to like is mainstream homogenized top 40 stuff. I really like blues, rock, zydeco, celtic, klezmer, classical, and more. I'm probably a little too obsessed with Ani DiFranco at the moment. (links)

Politics - I used to call myself a Democrat or a Liberal. For a while I toyed with Communist and Anarcho-Syndicalist. None of the labels really seemed to stick. These days I call myself a Leftist Muppet, I think thats suitably vague and yet oddly descriptive. I tend to think the Green Parties are pretty rockin' and always worth a vote. (links)

Star Trek - Some people think I am way to into Star Trek. I suppose I do attend conventions. I do know weird and obscure trivia. I have my walls littered with various ST comic books and posters. I have the autographs of several Star Trek actors. I'm not that bad am I?...oh maybe I am. Oh well...

Biking - I love to ride bikes and when I'm not riding I am thinking about riding more. Several years ago a bunch of friends and I rode a multi-day camping and biking trip and I am dying to do that again. I tend to ride in CU with an informal group when the weather is nice. I ride in Critial Mass every month. Someday I'd like to be as cool as Steve Roberts. (links)

Cooking - I love to cook crazy stuff. Cooking is a very meditative and relaxing part of my life. I lose recipes like crazy so I am resolving to keep my collected recipes here on my web pages.

Academics

Computer Science - Programming, system administration, teaching, learning, these are the things I do all the time. I have had several jobs in the computer field and many classes. I'm sure you want to pay me. (links)

Physics - The harmony of the universe slowly uncovered by we mere mortals. Physics was the first thing I was really academically motivated in. For a while I even fancied myself a physics major but springs ate my soul and now I am happy reading an occasional book. I have done a number of independant research projects in physics outside of my normal classes.

Cognitive Science - When Linguistics, Computer Science, Philosophy, Neuroscience, and Psychology meet its a happy time. Because of my interests in Computer Science and Linguistics and specificially because of my interests in natural language processing and artificial intelligence, cogsci was a pretty natural choice for me. I hope to study cogsci in grad school. (links)

Mathematics - I'm so into math I voluntarily chose the "Mathematics and Computer Science" major over the Engineering CS major at UIUC. Physics and CS and Math are so intertwined that I can't help but connect them all in my mind. I Really like math and have always thought I was fairly good at it until I went to IMSA and met people who were good at it.

Institutions

IMSA - I went to high school at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. I took lots of cool classes there. I made lots of friends there. I became the computer geek dweeb boy that I am today there. The only downfall was that I had to rent out part of my soul and I lost a hunk of creativity for a while...its coming back though. It seems to happen to all IMSA geeks. A great school though. (links)

UIUC - I attended University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an undergraduate. Sad thing is I actually liked it. I was so ready for the horrors of a big school, but I found that bigness brings more oportunities to do cool things. (links)

USGS - Yipes! I've been a government employee, a fed. I worked for the US Geologic Survey. I was working on maintaining and expanding a CGI framework which was rapidly evolving into a replacement for the USGS's National Water Information System. Water data the USGS handles is used to predict floods, build bridges, make kyaking decisions, deploy sandbags, define floodplanes and all kinds of stuff.

Links

For those interested in my (poorly organized) interests, then check out my bookmarks. Thanks to bk2site for this capability. Please forgive the clutter.

You may have noticed my Featured Links of the Moment when you visited my home page.

If you are interested in people who are interested in me, then check out this incomplete list of pages which link to my pages or a similar list.