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I’m a systems engineer by trade, a molecular biologist by education and a serial dilettante. Online personality tests tell me I’m an INTP and an enneagram 5w4, if you put stock into that sort of thing - though a buzzfeed quiz I took says that if I was a cake, I would be tiramasu. Make of that what you will.
Professionally, I'm interested in infrastructure. Designing, troubleshooting, maintaining, and necromancing infrastructure back from the dead. call it systems engineering or site reliability engineering or dev ops, i don't care. i spend hours googling esoteric errors, banging my head into my keyboard only to realize i've forgotten a semi-colon somewhere and for some reason i love it.
A list of non-work related topics I’m interested in:
- engineering failures and disasters (planes, submarines, ships, bridges, buildings, industrial accidents, etc)
- failure of complex systems
- infrastructure of cities and the mechanical systems that keep them running
- adaptation to climate change and the impending collapse of the global biosphere...
- degrowth and circular economy
- the wildland-urban interface, city-as-an-ecosystem concept and permaculture
- UAPs... seriously, what are they?
- warfare and geopolitics
- renewable power
- mechanical watches, film cameras
Things I do for fun:
- read about anything and everything
- accumulate large amounts of useless trivial knowledge
- accumulate random skills with varying degrees of success
- write. I recently finished a mystery novel that i'm shopping around to agents, and I'll very occasionally update "my blog"
- larp as a contractor and attempt various DIYs around the house
- restore and fix garbage. last project was a 79' CX500 i got for $80 and brought back from the dead
- collect vintage & failed company swag. Stuff from companies like Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems would be super cool if anyone wants to send me any.
- rot on the couch as the soul crushing reality of existence sets in
Quotes i enjoy:
"Specialization is for insects"
- Robert Heinlein
“Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.”
- Chesterton’s Fence
"Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I’ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems."
- Jamie Zawinski
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
- Albert Allen Bartlett
"You are an aperture through which the universe is looking and exploring itself."
- Alan Watts
"I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned."
- Richard Feynman
"Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and Determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and will always solve the problems of the human race."
- Calvin Coolidge