me code good someday

I'm concerned about Science, Math and Engineering in the U.S.

Enrollments are down in these areas, public sentiment is negative (aren't all those jobs being outsourced?), and kids just don't think they're cool. This is unfortunate, because (in my opinion) these are exactly the skills we need to have, as a country, to stay competitive in the 21st century. Without them, we'll lose our key historic advantage: our ability to generate new value through invention and discovery. Plus, math is so fun, I have to share it!

I'm doing something about this in my neighborhood: I'm organizing a math circle in my daughter's school. Eventually I'd like to help spread this idea more broadly in Portland, and hopefully beyond.

I Think Video Games Are Important

I gave the keynote talk on October 8, 2004 to the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges titled Using Video Games to Motivate Computer Science Here are the slides from that talk.

Demos I gave:

Here's a link to balldroppings

Here's a link to Bridge Construction Set

I Enjoy MacOS X Programming

TeX-heads might be interested in the source to the reference card. Compile it with PDFTeX.

Cheap Impostor

I wrote Cheap Impostor because I wanted to make booklets, books, and magazines out of PDF files I created myself, as well as from web pages and downloaded manuals, etc. I learned that "imposition" is a prepress process that consists of reordering pages and n-upping them so that larger sheets of paper can be sliced and folded and turned into books or magazines. Cheap impostor does a simpler version of this, just 2-up, but it does do either books or magazines. I decided to release it shareware, and the response has been very gratifying.

Software toys

I love software toys, the paragon of which was the original SimCity. Kapwing is a simple pure-java toy I wrote, inspired by balldroppings, but more controllable. Right-click on a paddle to control which MIDI note and channel a ball collision causes. I haven't touched it in a long time. I apologize for the fullscreen-only interface. On MacOS X, it used to make sounds by default, but now you have to right-click on a paddle and change the MIDI device.

Things I think are cool

Work to eat, eat to live, live to bike, bike to work

I like to ride bicycles. Right now I'm a bit obsessed with my Soma cross bike. I think Vanilla bicycles are beautiful. I think Portland, Oregon is a wonderful place to live (but I fear many of its recent immigrants don't love it for the same reasons I do).

Joy at Work