I grew up fascinated by animals, fossils, rainforests, and Star Trek. Then my family got a 14.4 kb/s modem and everything changed. I was glued to the glowing screen, have been trying to understand it ever since.

Interests

The Internet is a worthy adversary, but I’m interested in these areas too.

We started Minifund.org to provide equipment and financial support for scientific field studies and conservation research programs. In return we receive a rare glimpse of super remote wilderness from the film & images gathered in the process. We have visited some ultra remote places in order to observe and document wild animals in their natural habitat. These are some of my favorite images. Robots amaze me because they bring the precision and speed of software to the physical world. Even more incredible is the access to technology engineers have right now. Tools like on-demand 3D printing, inexpensive sensors, and open hardware empower tinkerers to build and refine their ideas at home. Very cool. Renewable energy is crucial to our longevity, and the Sun has a lot to offer. Solar thermal collectors are a great choice for harvesting its awesome radiation. Massive arrays of low-cost mirrors could be robotically installed, monitored and serviced. The potential for scalability and automation is really intriguing. The wheel-to-commuter ratio is seriously out of whack right now in Los Angeles. The joys of the automobile have been eclipsed by the consequences of over 1,000,000 cars on the road. Traffic jams, sedentary lifestyle, pollution, and fast food are just the tip of the dipstick. One car per commuter simply isn’t a sane or sustainable ideal; we need a cultural shift.

Projects

Here are some of the apps I’ve developed over the years. Nothing too fancy.

Building on the Halftone Calendar concept I developed in college, I launched a tool to design and print your own halftone calendars and posters. You can share your creation with friends, download a preview PDF, or order a large print on-demand. This script I wrote takes JPG images and corrupts them by reorganizing some of their binary bits. The resulting image can be neato. It also works on video. Before Flickr existed I wrote a PHP application to upload, sort, resize and display my digital photos. At the time it was actually pretty sweet, but now it’s obsolete. It still houses thousands of vacation, party, and squirrel photos that never made it over to my Flickr account.

Articles

The thoughts, opinions, and ideas expressed here are the result of an infinite number of cats walking on my keyboard for an infinite amount of time.

I haven’t owned a car since high school. When I moved to Los Angeles after college, I started riding a bike, walking, and taking the bus to work. Five years later, I’m sharing my commuting experience with anyone who might find it useful or interesting, since being carfree is awesome. Here’s a little insight into my blood spatter experiment. You will need: 1 weapon; 1 victim.