User Profile

Befriend mike_mt (click here) if you want to see my regular journal entries. It doesn't cost any money, unless you already have a syndication stream or two on your friends list (though paid users probably won't have to worry). My website is still free, and I have some RSS feeds too. However, please also keep mulad as a friend so I can see private entries and whatnot. Yeah, I know that's kind of messed up...

I grew up in a fairly small town outside of Rochester, MN. My parents both worked at IBM, so you could say computers are in my blood. An inordinately large number of my grade/high school classmates required vision correction due to the high quantity of geek DNA from IBMers as well as the doctors at the Mayo Clinic.

I wore some awful looking glasses back then, as you can see from my senior picture. I have ones with smaller lenses now, and even they totally screw up my facial geometry. I think I'll get laser vision correction surgery done eventually, but that kind of requires money. Still, I'm not sure about what I've got to work with.

I've had a moderate interest in photography for a long time. Unfortunately, I'll never be much good at it, but you can see my trials at Flickr.

At the moment, I'm 28. I've never had much luck in the girlfriend department—I think that the main girl I had a crush on in high school put a curse on me. After such a long dry spell, it seems like a reasonable explanation. Of course, being a computer science major and a technogeek who stayed inside way too much, other possible explanations abound. If you're of the female variety and have even the vaguest interest in getting to know me, you can try checking out my OkCupid profile. If you answer a few dozen questions, you can begin to get an idea of whether I'd fit you or not.

Well, somehow I'll find a girlfriend one of these days. But I'll probably get hit by a bus about an hour later.

Sigh.

I'm smart, but somehow it never translates into charm or street-smarts or whatever you want to call it.

I believe in freedom and openness, which is why I hate the current U.S. administration. Sure, we had that horrendous day in 2001, but I've never believed that the appropriate response was to kill more people. Tens of thousands have died in the aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq. Probably a trillion dollars will have been spent before long, and right now both of those countries are still unsafe and unstable places.

Maybe I'm a liberal wimp, but I prefer to think that fundamental weapons against terrorism are food, shelter, medicine, education, fair business, fair justice, and adequate public services. In many cases, these are a lot cheaper than even a single B-2 bomber. That $87 billion for going to Iraq? That about covers the cost of sending people to Mars.

Okay, end rant.

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