My Bio

That interested in me, huh? Well, I'm 27 years old (May 1980), a recently single gay male, a coder in constant pursuit of deep hack mode, a Linux zealot, and I recently moved to San Francisco after previously living in Kansas all my life. I'm about 6'2" (188cm), and I weigh about 270 lbs (123kg). I definitely need to work out more, but I'm built more like a football player than an amorphous blob. (Physical labor has done wonders since college.) The picture to your right was taken in Feb 2007 with what was then my brand-new digicam.

Here is my Geek Code. If you don't know what it is, visit geekcode.com for a detailed explanation.

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS d-- s+:+ a- C++(++++) UL++++$ P+++ L+++ E- W+++
N(+) o?  K? w---(++) !O M- !V PS+++ PE-@ Y+ PGP+ t++@
5++ X+@ R+@ tv-- b+(++) DI++ D++ G++ e*>++ h+ r y+*
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

Mac note: the "M-" applies only to MacOS before OS X. OS X has a character prompt and thus no longer sucks. It's still not my favorite *nix, but I've dealt with far worse.

X-Files note: the "X+" applies only to X-Files up to and including the movie, "Fight the Future". Season 6 and beyond don't exist as far as I'm concerned. (Actually, the mytharc got tedious long before then — it's just I was too busy looking at Alex Krycek to care. But after Season 6, even the Monster of the Week episodes went downhill.)

In case you're curious about what "Chronos Tachyon" means, I chose it because it doesn't mean anything even though it sounds like it should. Now that I think about it, it's sort of like Transmeta, actually. Chronos (Χρονος - leading chi) comes from the Greek root word meaning "time", although many people incorrectly believe that it also refers to the Greek god Cronus/Kronos (Κρονος - leading kappa), the King of the Titans who was overthrown by his son Zeus. (The confusion is understandable given that, in the later years of their culture, the Greeks themselves mixed up the two when reading their earlier mythology.) Tachyon is also Greek, and -- besides being a hypothetical particle that travels faster than light/backwards in time (same thing, really) -- basically translates as "swift one". This mostly refers to my childhood fascination with the idea of time travel.

With regards to computers, I'm 100% Linux geek these days. I started off in 1999-ish with Slackware, hand-compiling everything not in the base distro and manually upgrading through three GCC C++ ABIs and two glibc major revisions.

Ugh. Screw that.

I'm a 100% Debian/Ubuntu user these days. Debian has dependencies done right.

With regards to sexual orientation, I'm gay and I figured it out a long time ago. Around age 12 I started to notice that I was interested in sex, just not sex with women. At first I assumed interest in women would come later, but after a few months, I put two and two together. It wasn't so much a brilliant flash as it was an "Oh. This does explain a few things."

I came out to my mom a month before my 16th birthday, and to the rest of my family later that year. (Somewhat involuntarily, but I digress.) I came out to close friends in high school and college, but I never did work up the guts to, for instance, tell my college roommates. It wasn't until I'd been working my post-college blue collar job for a year that I actually came out to someone who wasn't a friend. (It came up in conversation, so I told him. He was also a gossip hub, which saved me a lot of work.)

My most recent relationship was also my first serious one. We lasted from May 2005 to early 2008; it's kind of hard to pin down a specific date when things were clearly doomed, but we parted on fairly good terms when I moved away from Kansas. I consider it a valuable learning experience: things I could've done better on my part, things I should've been watching out for... and things from which I should've run away screaming.

With regards to religion, I'm a straight-up atheist these days, but it's been a journey.

For a while, back in high school, the one-word summary of my beliefs was Deism, the belief that there is a higher power that created the Universe, but rarely interferes: God the Watchmaker, or God who Got it Right the First Time and Didn't Have to Muck About with Miracles and Prophets and Virgin Births to Fix His Screw-Ups. It had its heyday in the Enlightenment of the 1700s; many of the American founders were Deists, as were many of their intellectual inspirations back in England. When I read about it as a teenager, it clicked with me in a way that Christianity hadn't.

Gradually, though, it became increasingly apparent to me that Deism was still one God more than I felt I could honestly believe in. By the time I entered college, I considered myself an "soft" agnostic — "Don't ask me, man, I didn't do it!". In the end, I found myself a "soft" atheist — "Well, I suppose a God could be hiding somewhere, if He/She/It really enjoys a good game of Hide-and-Seek, but who are we really kidding here?"

As a "soft" atheist, I don't deny the possibility of a higher power; however, I don't find it particularly likely, and I outright disbelieve in miracles or intervention of any sort. I'm also convinced that, if a higher power exists, He/She/It obviously doesn't give a rat's ass about whether or not we worship Him/Her/It and has no obvious intention to hand out advice about meaning-of-life stuff.

Enough on what I don't believe. Philosophically, I'm a Secular Humanist and a Utilitarian (albeit neither an Act Utilitarian nor a Rule Utilitarian, but something fuzzily in-between). I agree with large swaths of "The Ineffable Carrot and the Infinite Stick" by Ebon Muse, which lays out what he calls "Universal Utilitarianism".

If you haven't heard of it, Letting Go of God by Julia Sweeney is a surprisingly good listen. She's best known as the actress who played It's Pat! on Saturday Night Live, and she has a rather humorous take on her life's story. She does an excellent job of addressing the fears she initially felt about ethics without religion, and does it in a very friendly and approachable way.

I used to have a bit of a Buddhist streak going on... until I realized that, while there's such a thing as too much attachment to the materialist world, there's also such a thing as too little. Plus, after visiting museums with Buddhist iconography and religious art, I've decided that "The Eightfold Path" has about as much to do with real-world Buddhism as "Turn the other cheek" has to do with real-world Christianity. Big turn-off.

Less seriously, I'm also a Discordian. Hail Eris. If you're curious, my full Holy Name is "Saint Chronos Tachyon, Guardian of Eristic Paraphernalia and Gatekeeper of the Region of Thud". I'm also a card-carrying legally ordained minister via the Universal Life Church. Absolve your sins, only $5! (And, yes, the irony of being a legally ordained atheist minister is, in fact, as delightful as it sounds.)