Ah, cameras. Without them, we wouldn't have pictures. Just like 150 years ago. Here is a pile of moments in time, mostly from the last five years of my life. Keen observers will notice that my hair keeps changing length. Yeah, sometimes I can't believe I'd want it to look that way either.

Of particular interest might be the Burningman pictures. I had the pleasure of attending in 2000. Wow. What an event. You should go. In the world of Windows coders, there are the slaves to whatever Microsoft is pushing (currently, I think it's Visual C#++ XP.NET), and then there are those who know of better options from other companies. In this dork's case, it was Borland's product, Delphi. (Non-programmers can withhold judgment – enthusiasts in any area appear incredibly pedantic to the rest of us.)

Inside this link you'll find code that I'm proud enough to attach my name to. It's a lot of cryptography and applied math stuff, plus the occasional toying with Windows doo-dads like the registry. Once upon a time I was a real geek. One night I even got the crazy idea to write a multiple-precision math library in JavaScript. This allows your browser to perform calculations on numbers of any size. It's not as useless as it seems, though. With this library, I wrote a little web page that implements the RSA cryptosystem. This is the backbone for protocols like the secure socket layer which, among other things, keeps people from stealing your credit card numbers when you make online purchases.

So yes, I've reinvented the wheel. But in a new, silly kind of way. This was a project that began innocently enough back in '98. Like a lot of Windows apps, it got needlessly complicated, so much so that I made superfluous features the mainstay of the program.

In a nutshell, Wallpaper Changer Builder 6 is the most inane, heavyweight, ridiculous program for managing your desktop wallpaper. It comes with an equally inane and sarcastic help file, so you'll never be at a loss when trying to display a pie chart of your current wallpaper-candidate distribution profile. If you don't understand that last sentence, download the application and you will. Back in '96, I discovered decent country music by way of the alt-country scene. Wilco and Son Volt had just released their first albums, and it was a truly fresh take on an old sound. This inspired me to learn all the silly Americana instruments like banjo, mandolin, Dobro, and ultimately pedal steel. What a crazy instrument, and an even crazier way to think about music. But it's fun.

In my learnings, I've tabbed more than a handful of steel parts, including but not limited to the stuff you hear on mainstream country radio. And here's a bunch of it. Unlike today's brooding post-grunge guitar students, I developed my chops on the technical nonsense of '80s hair bands. For this I am grateful. The scene has changed, but the licks still flow through me like a Samborian poltergeist. The value of White Lion is lost on most folk, but if you could feel the excitement I had when I first heard Vito Bratta play the solo to "Wait," you'd know why it inspires me still.

This is a small sample of my transcription collection, namely the ones I've bothered to transfer from paper to text file. The variety is vast and probably odd -- everything from Dokken to Aaron Spelling TV show theme songs. Enjoy. Life should have stopped evolving at housecats. In fact, it probably did. There is something so humbling about sharing a space with an animal so closely and instinctually tied to the jungle. If it weren't for the reminders of air conditioning, kitchen utensils, and neutral-colored carpeting, I'd expect a gazelle to come bounding across the living room at any given moment.

This is a collection of photos of a feline I worship. He is bright, communicative, stripy as all get-out -- and unfortunately 2,000 miles away. His owner moved, and with her he went. I am left with nothing but memories and this tribute. New Year's Eve 2000 was pretty fun. But you'd never know that if you had a snapshot of Soraya and me just eight hours prior. Apparently flying on the last day of the year is risky business: sometimes they cancel your connecting flight just because. Stranded halfway between home and our Virginian destination, we mustered one last bit of politeness and found a suitable alternate route -- if "suitable" includes two hours of I-95 madness.

But this is not that story. This is the story of the aftermath. Two weeks later, I mustered up still more politeness and wrote a kind letter to our screwors. The shocking conclusion of this tale lies within. UnGraph is a commercial Windows application I wrote for automatically digitizing data from published graphs. The idea is simple: scientists frequently have access only to a chart in a journal. They'd like to extract specific data points, but they want a better solution than simply eyeballing the lines. With only a few starting points, UnGraph will automatically digitize the data and fit a spline, giving users an accurate means to extract any value in the data set.

This program is sold through Biosoft in the United Kingdom. Clicking on the flask will take you to their site. For a long time, I thought "hobbyist" would be as far as I'd take my music stuff. Then I met a whole pile of people doing it professionally. Since then, I've had good luck getting in with fine groups of all sorts.

Currently, I work steadily with three bands playing everything from country to classical. Inside you'll find details on these projects, including schedules, personnel, and a few photos. I used to be an HTML curmudgeon. Any web design I did would be by hand, and pathologically low-tech. I registered a domain name mostly to have a consistent e-mail address.

Then I started getting e-mails from random people who just happened to type my domain name into a browser, or who happened to find my site from a search engine.

Soon I realized that I owed better content to all the bored folks out there. And I owed them a little information about myself. It's all in the name of entertainment. E-mail makes me happy. Even mean e-mail. We people, well, we like it when others are thinking about us.

So drop me a line!