I say my name with a “long a” sound (IPA ⟨e⟩), so it basically rhymes with “safe.” But I get lots of alternate pronunciations! ↩︎

What a fraught emotional landscape! If it even makes sense to use a single word for a person, then that word for me is ambivalent.^[9][8:1] ↩︎ ↩︎

I love to create, with my mind and my hands, whether that uses yarn, paper, wood, metal, eggs and flour, or whatever is at hand. I’ve designed and constructed all of the infrastructure^[14] for my family’s off-grid homestead. I write computer programs quite often, and I support open-source software^[15] whenever possible! ↩︎ ↩︎

Even though almost half of people who start don’t finish doctoral programs—and, make no mistake, I am proud^[7] that I finished—I still feel embarrassed about it because it took me seven years. ↩︎

My intellectual and creative interests are wide-ranging^[3:1], sometimes to the point that I have a hard time pursuing any one interest to “conclusion.”^[13] ↩︎

Have a look at my CV if you’re interested in that sort of thing. ↩︎

Proud mixed with many other feelings^[2:1][8], including relieved. Fewf! ↩︎

Fortunate is another word describing me, to go with ambivalent^[9:2]. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

Ambivalent has roots that roughly mean “both values”—think ambi- like ambidextrous (both handed^[11]) and -valent like equivalent (same strength). To me, ambivalence means that a person has both positive and negative feelings simultaneously (about a thing). Many people confuse ambivalent with indifferent, which means roughly that a person lacks feelings (about a thing). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

The project was based on the excellent, now-defunct theano toolkit, and even got a few hundred github stars. I’m biased of course, but I think the API that I developed was excellent. ↩︎

Technically, dexterous actually means something more like “right” but as a left-hander^[12] I scoff at the conflation of (cultural) correctness and lateral asymmetry. ↩︎

Roughly 10% of humans are left-handed, which is an interesting asymmetry in itself. The relative rarity of left-handed behaviors seems to have led, in multiple cultures, to the left hand being associated with badness (e.g., the latin root for left gives us the word sinister, handshakes are almost universally performed with right hands). I highly recommend Stanley Coren’s book, The Left-Hander Syndrome, for lots of fascinating information about handedness. ↩︎

Chronic depression, anxiety, and procrastination have been companions of mine since I was in high school^[16]. I finally started taking medication^[17], and it has been enormously helpful in improving my lived experience as well as some of my behaviors, especially when combined with talk therapy. ↩︎

We started with an existing well and a bunch of huge logs from downed trees, and we now have: a tool shed; water storage, filters, and pressure pump; solar panels, breakers, charge controllers, batteries, and inverter; internet and local network; and a massive TODO list. ↩︎

I’ve contributed so far to the pandas data processing library and the click UI toolkit. In grad school I developed a neural network toolkit^[10] as a way to understand the modeling and optimization techniques that were being developed in academic papers. ↩︎

I was really fortunate^[8:2] to attend the North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics, a public, residential, two-year magnet high school in Durham, North Carolina. Science & Math improved my life in so many ways and remains one of the handful of things in my life that I’m not ambivalent^[9:1] about. ↩︎

I resisted medication actively for decades because it felt like I would somehow lose myself if I started taking some drug. But in reality no medication is that good. I still have all the problems, they’re just a little more manageable. ↩︎