Top things to know about me:

I live in San Francisco with my most righteous better half, Beki Grinter.

I like to cook a lot. Especially if it involves potential loss of life and limb, or obscene amounts of oil.

I'm a student of Freemason-inspired conspiracy, but my friend Paul Dourish is much more knowledgeable about that stuff than I am. If you want a primer, read Foucault's Pendulum (Umberto Eco), or Holy Blood, Holy Grail (Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln). Both of these are long reads, but well worth it. I guess you can skip them if you want the short version, because it all comes back to the aliens and the Vatican anyway. The Freemasons have recently got themselves a web site, but it's obviously a ruse as it has no pertinent information about the aliens.

Raccoons are my favorite animal. Giant squids are a close second though.

I like to read a lot. Recent reads include Mason-Dixon (Thomas Pynchon), Underworld (Don Delillo), The Sotweed Factor (John Barth), A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy O'Toole), Pale Fire, again (Vladimir Nabokov, and it's just as good the second time around), Towing Jehovah (James Morrow), Possession (A.S. Byatt), Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), and Galapagos (Kurt Vonnegut).

The world is blessed that I have so little musical talent that I generally never touch an instrument. Nevertheless, I listen to a lot of stuff. My current top-shelf musical selections are Ozomatli, the Complete Recordings of Robert Johnson, the Crumb soundtrack, Information (by Toenut, a great Atlanta band), Puta's Fever (Mano Negra, a great French band), Rollin' (Rebirth Brass Band), Passage in Time (Dead Can Dance), Bone Machine (Tom Waits), Stratosphere Boogie (Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant: great early speed-death-country), Whip-Smart (Liz Phair), and just about any damned thing ever recorded by James Brown, the Pixies, Patsy Cline, or Etta James.

I got doctorized at Georgia Tech in the venerable discipline of computer science. My old home page has been slowly rotting, but you can visit it to inspect the remains.

From there I moved on to Xerox PARC, where I'm a senior member of the research staff, and get to play with a bunch of the technologies that our government got from the small greys in the abductee-for-tech swap after Roswell.

In earlier past lives, I worked at SunSoft, Sun Microsystems Labs, and the now-defunct Olivetti Research Center (all on internships), and a bunch of places as a consultant, including the now-defunct NeXT Computer.

Going all the way back, I was born in Fredricksburg, Virginia, and grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I'm a leo and my favorite color is blue.