Some things about me

I've struggled to find common themes in the things I do. They lie in some overlapping portion of a Venn diagram, with circles labelled technology, politics, and self-expression.

The resume now says I'm interested in cooperation at Internet scale. I decided that was the real role of those of us who build online services. The forces that rule the world today, like capitalism, are only powerful to the degree that they help coordinate cooperation. Now we have new techniques that promise a whole new dimension of such coordination.

I'm also fascinated by maps, visual data, or any other way of experiencing a reality larger than yourself through the senses.

And then there's this, which even I am at a loss to explain.

Why "brevity"?

It's been my nickname on most every computer system since the mid-90s. It is not descriptive: I ramble a lot. My hope is that through editing, I can present you with a delicious frozen concentrate of my brain.

As an IRC buddy once said: 'brevity is heterologous'.

Sometimes I also tell people that it's a distillation of Orwell's classic essay Politics and the English Language. It would be a fine thing if this essay were included in the purchase of every computer keyboard.

For a web guy, this site really sucks.

My idea of a reasonable website involves writing my own Apache modules. But I have to draw the line somewhere. This hurts me more than it does you.

Things I'm interested in

Web-based interfaces
Programming languages
Art and computation
REST APIs, done right
Visualizing data

I'd like to do more

travelling
functional programming
photography
right-brained work
martial arts

Causes I'd support

literacy
government transparency
health insurance reform (USA)