ABOUT ME
Loves: ("a few of my favorite things")
- Music: Rachmaninoff, Talking Heads, singing
- Travel, esp. Russia and Czech Republic
- My family; too easy, as they're so awesome
- Computing, both for fun and for sustenance
- Discussing ideas, deep, mundane, or crazy, with my wonderful set of brilliant and quirky friends. Presenting and discussing papers on such.
- Arts: Ballet, Opera, Symphony
- Books: Tolkien, Robertson Davies, H. Potter!
- History and Religion
- SF Bay area: came for college, never left
Occasional contradictions:
- conscientious objector Eagle Scout
- cave-dwelling world explorer
- sentimental curmudgeon
- free-thinking Mormon
Surprises:
- ran (well, mostly) Honolulu Marathon
- played in the Rose Bowl
I do lots of singing, especially in a really excellent local chorus, and direct my church choir.
I've written a pretty cool web app to create "customized rehearsal accompanists" from general MIDI files.
OK. I love playing with machines!
In the early days, when I was incredibly lucky to belong to the team that created Smalltalk, I was astounded at what fun it was to work all day teaching this precocious dog to stand up, dance, and perform amazing tricks.
I love, love, love the incredible world-wide 24/7/365 library Google et. al. have provided me.
I love learning new languages (human ones, too) and exploring their expressive possibilities.
I've been accused of believing (which I don't, quite) that any problem can be solved with a program.
Despite such pleasant rapture, I know the dangers of our over-awed bedazzlement with computing. Too great a confidence in financial modeling contributed to the 2008 meltdown in the mortgage and hedge fund markets. Uncheckable computerized voting invites both bugs and mischief. . . .
But overall, I'm still amazed and inspired by both the tremendous work and the beautiful ballet that electrons can perform under the guidance of a bunch of 1's and 0's.
I've recently rediscovered my fondness for cooking nice meals. You can go to my full page of recipes, or check here for occasional highlights. I especially love this recipe for Tuna Tartare
My friend Jane Maynard has a fine blog about cooking for your family.
I'm no fundamentalist wacko (see the rest of my site), but it occurs to me that I've got spots here for each of the three celebratory activities that represent life in the Heavenly Kingdom. (Luke 15:23-25) And we certainly can't leave out the most joyously physical of them.
I love many kinds of dance, but especially contradance.
Alright. Can I really be a socialist anarchist?
Obama pretty much had me at "hope."
- I really do hope for a better, more compassionate, more familial, world.
- I hope we can put the good of our children and of the earth above our laziness and self-indulgence.
- I hope for a political system more responsive to good ideas than to money.
- I hope other Americans will begin to recoil at the war crimes and torture committed in our name.
- I hope my small efforts and words can make a difference
I love Bill Moyers' clear vision and undaunted spirit.
As of Jan 2009, I'm tired of emails asking me for even more money for campaign coffers.
The Web is so full of a number of things. Inter alia, I've collected some fun and interesting sites, some beautiful or awe-inspiring pictures, and lots of examples of nice design or programming I may want to imitate in my own work.
I love to travel, especially to get to know societies in transition.
So I've been to eastern europe many times, just learning how people are feeling, their struggles and joys, and what is both gained and lost in the move towards market economies and popular democracy.
I've written some technical papers, but that's elsewhere. Most of my other writing is on Mormon topics. I love thinking about the "big issues," what it means to believe in God, what makes anything at all right or wrong, what are the implications of the peculiarly LDS understanding of Christianity, etc.
This is both an area for my own personal applications, like my password vault and my web contact list, and a place to remember and keep track of my archives of half completed projects, works in progress, etc.