Of Interest

"A man will fight harder for his interests than for his rights."
-Napoleon Bonaparte

These are a few of my favorite things...

Come on down to Tech Squares on Tuesday nights for some great square dancing -- it's not what you remember from fourth-grade gym class. (My favorite call is "weave the ring" -- gotta love that hand-clapping flourish!) Also fun is ballroom dancing: tango is the best, with cha-cha (cure to all ills) coming up as a close second.

Aparna and I cha-cha to the
sound of soldering
(does soldering make a sound?)

In my long-ago youth I was co-founder of Shooting Star Productions, nee Smiley Software, the producer of really, really, really dumb computer games. Nowadays I write medical documentation software, which isn't nearly as fun, perhaps, but actually gets used by people other than myself.

Oh, wow.... Really, I absolutely won't be able to do this stupendous topic justice on a webpage. Ask me in person for the unabridged "quantum computing is so cool" dance with accompanying incoherent exclamations of eigen-somethings.

Join the cult and sacrifice all your last remnants of free time to the great gods of Paint by Numbers! These are not the crayon-colored pictures you did in kindergarten, but instead intriguing logic fill-in-the-grid puzzles. You can find them in any issue of Games Magazine.

Anything classical, especially Italian opera and Romantic era piano concertos, are automatically good. The rest of my music collection is erratically divided between Broadway musicals, medieval Gregorian chants, Simon and Garfunkle, and computer game soundtracks. I also enjoy playing classical music on the piano, as long as it doesn't have too many scary sharps or flats in the key signature.

Fun! Take a look at graphical representations of some of the more common ones. Radix sort is the best!

It all started with a gift of an Einstein-sticking-out-his-tongue magnet from my wonderful high school physics teacher. Then I added the yellow smiley-face one from the Museum of Fine Arts' gift shop, and next thing I knew my fridge door was getting crowded with all the bits of colored metal and plastic. Luckily the refrigerator's sides are magnetic too...

Ms. Sadovnik, who initiated me
into the tragic world of
refrigerator magnet collecting.

These are so amazing. You can take a differential equation and then Laplace it and make it an algebraic equation and then solve it and then inverse-Laplace it -- and you get the answer to the original differential equation! How cool is that!

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