macroaesthetics

music

Forced to study piano. Big mistake - it turned me off the field for years.
Had a cherry red Washburn in college, sold it before going home.
Did a lot of editing on computers between 1996 and 2002.
I have a violin, but I have barely touched it.

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coffee

One no brainer career would be to open a cafe, and sit in a corner doing quantitative research for the rest of my life. In 2013 I helped someone set up a third-wave coffee shop, so I learnt the ropes of specialty coffee.
Otherwise it's just a performance enhancing drug, to me.

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athletics

I like to run. I grew up trailing behind my dad who was an avid middle-distance jogger. I wish I had the priority to study parkour. I don't run much, these days.
I started studying body-weight conditioning and strength training in college. I don't know a whole lot about it, and again, I wish I had a slightly higher priority for this sort of thing, given that ladies seem to like the results. Unfortunately the ladies aren't yet a super high priority. Perhaps I will grow old, perpetually scrawny. I have a slightly used weights room, at home.
I have a bicycle. I ride a mountain bike on busy city streets, and then some.
I can hold my own on a basket ball court, and also on a soccer field when I am in shape.

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visual art

some photography
some digital editing; of photographs, as well as vector illustrations
minimal video production
a lot of work in the web medium
some work in other media
some 3D modelling (Blender)

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data structures

minimalist ontologies

from what do we derive all memory?
simple but complex enough to allow emergent phenomena

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natural language

WordNet by Princetonians is a cool project.

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science

2014-05-20. Time to rejoin the tribe of Kaggle. I looked into this as a way to study stats... in 2012. Back then my tool was Erlang, and I got side-tracked pretty quickly, ended up in Haskell, and finally got back to C++. Now I think I'll study C++ and stats together... long and slow. That's what this is shaping up to be.

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computing

workflow

vim, is my editor of choice
git, is my source-code control tool of choice
virtual machines, are the degree of IDE encapsulation that I prefer (Vagrant, Chef, Ansible, are looking pretty tasty right now - Docker not so much, though it has its uses)
for task management, as you can seem from the design of this site, I enjoy minimalist solutions, so a tool like Trello, or just a virtual post-its board (amounting to a slightly prettier spreadsheet) works for me

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pop-scale web development

PHP: much, particularly CakePHP
Python: some, enough to get a Google App Engine project running
Ruby: some, enough to help a friend with homework
MySQL: some, enough to build a social network, and a stock trading game
MongoDB: some, enough to build applications

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erlang

mainly interested in: Erlang/OTP technology's potential for use to build the underlying fabric ("infrastructure") for virtual and high-performance computing applications. Examples of projects in this space are Erlang on Xen and Clustrx OS. The architecture seems much more biological than most procedural / "stuck to the metal" approaches at the turn of the 20th century.
studied: underlying architecture of the runtime system, and how OTP applications are organised
prototyped: an MVC web framework with interpolable Erlang script in HTML

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haskell

mainly interested in: Haskell's concise syntax, from a language user's point of view. Aesthetically the indentation semantics also appeal to me. The fact that it is semantically "pure", and the fact that it compiles really close to the metal appear to be next in the line of appealing conveniences. Finally the fact that the language is supported by language nerds makes me feel a bit more at home, for merely tribal reasons.
prototyped: an MVC web framework with interpolable Haskell script in HTML; on MongoDB

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C / C++ / Objective-C

I need to learn this properly at some point, as a rite of passage. At least it will help me understand the opportunity costs of working in a higher level language like Haskell.
I must admit some shyness to Objective-C is due to my avoidance of distractions which are likely to arise as soon as I go near programming consumer applications (read: games).
I've started working through the MIT Open-Courseware on C++, whereas the wiki on C syntax is quite eloquent also.

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employment

think tanks

a diplomatic arm of Putrajaya

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consulting

compensation & benefits, first for-profit job
worked with some ex-GE folks on organisational development and change management methodologies for humans

macroaesthetics

music

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coffee

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athletics

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visual art

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microaesthetics

sight

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sound

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taste

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smell

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flesh

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data structures

minimalist ontologies

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natural language

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science

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mathematics

probability & statistics

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linear algebra

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abstract algebra

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