LJ Interests meme results

1. boston:
   Err…I live here. I lived in Chicago until a little less than 2 years ago (wow…has it really been that long?), where I was a fresh college grad with nothing better to do than unsuccessfully job-hunt and read/post Slashdot, which ended up landing me the interview with my current company in Medford, MA.
2. carnivorous plants:
   Adapted for survival in peat bogs and very nutrient-poor soils, some plants have developed the ability to supplement their diets by capturing and digesting small insects (and the occasional small rodent, for the very largest of the Nepenthes), falling leaf matter and even bird poop. I’ve always been fascinated by these, but only recently started collecting them. It probably bugs a couple of my friends to know that my windowsill eats more meat than they do.
3. computer science:
   Logic, logic, logic…finite and discrete states. I don’t do well in the land of “maybe”, so CS is a place where I’m comfortable. I didn’t actually major in it, but I do end up writing a lot of code both at work and as part of various hobby projects.
4. digital signal processing:
   Kind of goes along with the previous. Separating a signal from noise, or extracting the most possible information from sources that may be kind of questionable. (It works as both an engineering exercise, and a metaphor. Hah.)
5. fishing:
   I like to fish. It always brings back fond childhood memories of getting up at 5am to go fishing with my dad out on the lake…it was so quiet, peaceful, no worries and no distractions, just nature and a hint of steam rising from the water’s surface in the chilly morning air.
6. geeking out:
   What I do best. I am a geek, and admit it freely. And tend to go off on random geek tangents, completely not considering that whoever’s listening might not give a damn and/or have the slightest idea what I’m talking about. “Sorry, I just geeked out.”
7. hardware design:
   What else I do best….and get paid for it. I’m an electronics engineer, and get to design the guts for all kinds of nifty gadgets.
8. nerds:
   The average sports-loving, NASCAR-watching Joe Sixpack tends to bore me, and vice versa. I’m a nerd, and pretty much prefer the company of nerds and intellectuals. And I’m in no position to be offended at the social ineptitude of others :-)
9. retro computing:
   For some reason I think ancient hardware is really fucking cool. Back before everything was hidden away inscrutibly on insanely complex and application-specific silicon, computing has been done with water, motors, gears, relays, punched paper, discrete logic gates. You could study them, watch the gears turn and the states flip and understand what they were doing.
10. self-organizing systems:
    …kind of the other end of the spectrum. For some reason this for me condures up images of our creations taking on an almost biological air, so irreducibly complex that we dare not even try to understand them; although it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Think along the lines of networking hardware that can detect other nodes, cooperatively work out optical routes between themselves, identify the capabilities of everything in their reach and mesh themselves into an optimal, robust net even while individual nodes come and go and move around. I’d like to get into that kind of stuff more, but don’t really have time for it.

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