About your host

A grail of laughter of an empty ashcan production

The author of this site is an unhealthily busy independent systems consultant whose current principal contract is with a firm that specializes in cryptography. In former lives, he has been a reporter/photographer, a web designer, and a senior software designer with a sizeable telecomm, among other things. Strangely, however, his degree is in biology. He cannot precisely remember how all of this happened.

He is married, and has two children--a daughter and a son. As both he and his wife are rather touchy about personal details being left around the web, this is as much detail as you will find about his family here.

He plays cello, writes code that has nothing to do with his work, and gardens, when time permits. He wrote a novel around a year ago, and is sporadically trying to sell it. He's also writing another, though the pressures of life are such that this effort is pretty slow going right now. On top of all this, and against all reason, he's also trying to maintain a blog--you can find it at http://accidentalweblog.org.

His likes include: rainy weather, sunny weather, windy weather, wild snowstorms and thunderstorms, and (especially) really bitterly cold winter weather, cats, dogs, dinosaurs, fish, herons, mountains, hills, valleys, forests, lakes, oceans, beaches, red giants, blue supergiants, yellow dwarfs, and so forth, old brick houses, slightly unkempt lawns, and being satirically, entertainingly irrational, when confronted by the fundamental irrationality that pervades so much of contemporary discourse. He likes elegantly written C++ and Java, really hackish Perl and C, and the Debian linux distro. He likes the Beasties, the Chili Peppers, Midnight Oil, Lou Reed, Robbie Robertson, Daniel Lanois, and Tom Waits. He likes Hart Crane's Chaplinesque, and Edwin Arlington Robinson's Reuben Bright. He likes jagged edges, and rough terrain. He likes conversations which bounce randomly in all directions simultaneously, and people who can sustain them. He is very fond of very, very hot food, including particularly (Thai) panangs and (Indian) vindaloos. He lives for espresso, and for fresh, strong, lightly roasted coffee, brewed at concentrations that corrode stainless steel. Batdorf and Bronson made him the man he is. He finds much of the universe beautiful, though he isn't sure he can say this extends to New Jersey.

His dislikes include political and economic ideologies entirely divorced from empirical criticism, and thus evolved to extraordinarily hazardous, extraordinally arrogant de facto religions, all mysticism, obscurantism, and superstition, all persons who pervert reason to defend the same, and all who cheapen the complex beauty of this existence by attempting to insist such mental cancers are necessary lenses for its appreciation. He also strongly dislikes all baked goods containing raisins (yes, this includes butter tarts), and most seafoods involving molluscs and crustaceans (yes, this includes lobster and shrimp). He is intensely bored by conversations about cars, sports, or celebrities that go to any length whatsoever.

He is also prone to writing about himself in the third person.

-- AJM, updated 2 March 2005