I’m a West-Coast born (11/3/1986, in a small town just north of Seattle) modern geek, raised on my dad’s coffee and temperate weather. For college, I went to Minnesota where no one drank coffee and winter lasted six months. For study abroad, I went to Japan where I stumbled around the language, the culture, and the (excellent) public transportation, and managed to avoid both the wet weather and the coffee.

This website is, or will be, a host for my posts on programming, politics, (maybe) games, and my fiction. I switch frequently among these interests, but my current focuses are web development frameworks (particularly in Ruby), East Asian politics (particularly China), and MMORPGs (which are primarily targets of my disappointment).

My professional work is in web development, working with codebases in Python, Ruby, and PHP, with one project almost entirely in Javascript with jQuery. I’m not a designer, but I’m competent in XHTML and CSS, and did almost all the design of this site and AgingWellNet.com. I also like to experiment with small projects using C, Ruby, Python, and the iPhone SDK, and occasionally choose to spend my time poking through the Rails code base.

My favorite course in my computer science program was Compilers, for which I and my classmates each developed our own compiler for a subset of C (which our professor called C-flat).

My interests are consistently inconsistent (a line from Frazz – one of my favorite newspaper comics). I play all sorts of games, from MMORPGs, which I spend less time playing than trying to redesign in my head, to miniatures wargames, for which I collect and meticulously assemble both the pieces and the strategies. I still haven’t decided whether game designer is my dream or nightmare job, but it’s something I plan to try.

My other hobbies are comparably scattered. Although my top two authors – Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman – both write fantasy, my other recently read-and-loved authors include William Gibson in cyberpunk, Paul Watzlawick for non-fiction, and Haruki Murakami for postmodern fiction. In music, as well, I jump between wildly different genres: indie to metal, metal to eurodance, eurodance to Lyle Lovett, Lyle Lovett to the Beatles, and so on.