Posts :: all (rss)

music
I grew up in a musical family, and learned guitar as a kid. Later, I taught myself piano, mandolin, bass, foot drums, whistle, brass, and other things. I play for contra dances with Kingfisher and the Free Raisins, and enjoy figuring out how to play as many things simultaneously as I can.
kids
Julia and I have three kids, Lily, Anna, and Nora. As of Summer 2023, they are nine, seven, and two. As a parent, my goal is to show them how to do things, do for them what they can't do yet, and help them grow into the people they want to be.
food
Everyone needs to eat. Looking through past posts, I see a slow progression from a focus on frugality, to veganism (vegan housemates), to kids.
contra
I've been contra dancing all my life, but got really interested in it in college. I help organize our local dance and dance weekend, play for dances with my two bands, lead open bands, maintain listings of local dances and weekends/camps/etc, and used to call.
tech
I'm a software engineer at the Nucleic Acid Observatory working in bioinformatics. I used to work on webpage optimization and ads at Google, and am still interested in web browsers, web APIs, and improving privacy/security/efficiency by adding new capabilities to browsers.
ling
I majored in linguistics in college, along with computer science, and am still interested in language. I especially interested in changes in how language handles gender, and have been following the slow and steady growth of singular they.
ideas
I often have thoughts about how things could be better, and enjoy writing them up. Sometimes I end up building a prototype or otherwise making them happen, but most of them don't get past the idea stage.
ea
I'm interested in how I can most effectively turn my time and money into making the world better, and Julia and I have been into effective altruism since ~2009. In 2022 I switched from earning to give to trying to identify future pandemics earlier: more.
covid-19
The pandemic has been a huge part of our lives, displacing many things and shifting how we do many others. A large fraction of my 2020 and 2021 posts chain back to the pandemic, even if I haven't categorized them that way here.
money
A mix of economics, policy, and my personal experience. I'm especially into financial transparency, writing up our personal finances and those of projects I've been involved in.
house
Julia and I have a two family house in Somerville, where we live with our kids and housemates. Physically, the building was initially in pretty rough shape, and we've put a lot of work into fixing it up and making it the way we like it. Socially, we like having other people around, and I really value the 'socializing by default' that comes from having housemates.

All 2,227 posts going back to 2004: