A little about me

What do I do? Well, several things. I’m a freelance copy editor and Spanish translator, and I've got a real job as a computer operator (IBM AS/400) and helpdesk technician for a hospital. I got my A.A. in Psychology and Spanish from Lorain County Community College, then studied Spanish, Linguistics, and Psychology at Cleveland State University. After being out of school for a while, I decided to go back and pursue a degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Toledo, which is where I'm at now, and explains why I'm an undergraduate at the age of 31. Eventually I'd like to apply artificial intelligence to bioinformatics, but I have to get past Calculus first.

When I have free time, I'm either writing writing a book on Microsoft Flight Simulator that I've been working on for about three years and two versions of Flight Simulator, reading, slowly but surely improving my violin skills, or catching up on old, classic video games (I recently completed Deus Ex, only five years after it came out. I am also a member of Mensa, which may explain why I use Opera (see below) and Linux. And, for those of you who aren't me, I've provided a bulleted list of the indispensible things to know about Being Larry Coleman below, suitable for a PowerPoint presentation. (But remember to divide the list into no more than three bullet points per slide--your coworkers have short attention spans.)

I keep my computer just as busy as myself. Distributed computing is such a good idea that if it didn’t exist, it would be necessary to invent it. Once the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search finally discovers a 10,000,000 digit prime number, I'll get back to work on some BOINC projects. There's no reason a computer should be wasting CPU cycles idling when it could be doing work that could benefit science or discover a cure for some disease like cancer.

I do much of my surfing with Opera, as it is simply by far the best browser I’ve ever seen. It lives up to its claim to be the "fastest browser on Earth," but it has even more important strengths. There are dozens of reasons to like it more than IE and Netscape put together, but the best one is the ability to restart from where you left off if it or your computer crashes. I open up browser windows faster than I can go through them, so I frequently have ten or more open at one time. If IE crashes, all is lost in that window and, in some cases, it takes all your IE sessions with it in its death throes. Though IE 6 is far more stable than its previous incarnations, it is still is as reliable as your typical Microsoft product--browsing with it is like riding on top of a time bomb with a broken clock while strapped to the back of a dead turtle; that is, it’s slow as hell and you never know when it’s going to blow up. In the rare event Opera crashes, simply open it up again and it will give you the option to pick up where you were last. And if that’s not enough, you can validate your HTML with a single keystroke. But wait, there’s more! No need to download a separate application to stop pop-up windows; the functionality is built right in. Did some moron embed music in their page, set it to loop endlessly, and not leave a control to turn it off? Just turn off sounds in Quick Preferences. Did another Bobo disable right-click functionality in IE because they don't want you to copy things that they just ripped off some other website (without crediting the source, naturally)? Opera never loses right-click functions. Want to find something at Google or Amazon? Type "g [keyword]" or "z [keyword]" in the address bar, and there you are. Or simply highlight a word or words on the page, right-click on "Search with" and there you are again. These features alone make it worth paying for, but it’s free. And no, I don’t work on commission for them; they simply got it right. Firefox is quickly catching up, too. There really is no reason to use IE at all anymore.

Two other programs worth mentioning are Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet and AARON, both available at Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies. The former is a screensaver that writes poetry after reading poems by others, and the latter makes drawings. The screensaver is free, with an optional writer’s assistant for an additional fee, and AARON is free for a trial, $19.95 if you decide to keep it. You can see it in action at my Steely Dan and Lisa Loeb à la Cybernetic Poet page.

But back to me. As you may have noticed, my design philosophy is minimalist: function over form. I have neither the time nor the inclination to look at your pretty little animations, listen to your irritating music, jump through hoops to navigate your site, or strain my eyes trying to read yellow text on a white background. If your content is so bad you need to resort to tricks to cover up for it, I’m going to leave anyway, regardless of whatever else you do. And if you dare tell me to use Internet Explorer, I’ll never be back, even if the content is good. Sure, I went through the gimmick phase, too, and I know how to use that BS, but an important part of the learning process is learning to resist temptation. I think the content of this site can stand on its own, and leave it to you to judge it on its merits.

I’ve designed this site to present what it has as quickly and as readibly as possible in any browser you use at any resolution. Few things--beyond specifying a specific browser--are as stupid as specifying a resolution. I encountered the nadir of pseudo-rigid form stupidity at a site that pried into my settings and displayed this message at the top of the page: "Warning! This webpage is best viewed with screen resolution 1024*768. Your current resolution is 1280*1024. If possible, please change the resolution!" What the hell is this person thinking? I should have to do his design work for him? I should have to work because he was too lazy to make his site interoperable? The W3C cites a few of the many benefits of using style sheets, among which is "using relative measurements in your style sheet, you can style your documents to look good on any monitor at any resolution." Sure, it’s a little bit of work, but that’s part of being a webmaster. The sad part of it is that it was at a virtual airline that I would have considered joining because of their unique coverage. I love flying old Kai Tak in the simulator (I kept Flight Simulator 2000 on the hard drive just for the checkerboard approach). Yet another example of how FrontPage is dangerous in the wrong hands. In fact, any WYSIWYG editor is like dynamite: an excellent tool in skilled hands, but when amateurs get a hold of it, the wrong stuff blows up and things get real ugly real quick.

Larry Coleman 101: The PowerPoint Presentation

This list was an exercise in self-referential free association which actually proved to be quite interesting from a cognitive point of view. There is a very strange logic to going from infinity the number to corporations named Infinity (which reminded me of Infinity Broadcasting which led to Clear Channel) which led to Larry Ellison to Harlan Ellison, whereupon the chain breaks. It really gets on a roll again when I address words. It took some effort, but I managed to fracture my life into 101 bite-sized fragments for your enjoyment.

The story gets a bit more convoluted, though. After I composed an earlier (and shorter) version of this list, I stumbled across Eve Andersson's site for the second time in a few years. In all my years on the Internet (a hint about how long that is: I know what FTP stands for, and I've done it from a command line because there were no other options) hers is the only site I've come across through links to other sites I was on for completely different subjects. It's sort of like picking a book on Pi from the stacks of the New York Public Library, then, years later, while researching a completely different topic, picking the same book off the shelves of MIT's library in a different section--all the while walking through the library blindfolded. That's a rather odd occurrence. In any case, I incorporated her questions into mine. On 3.5 things, our answers were identical though independent. This was a depressing discovery, as until now I've always thought I was unique. My worldview has been shattered as I see that Sesame Street lied to me.

Birthday in Pi: 60874 begins at digit 157393 (Am I in Pi? truncates 060874 to 60874, though it shouldn't)
Favorite digit not found in Pi: all of them
Favorite food: flan
Favorite dance: foxtrot
Favorite number: 42
Second favorite number: the square root of 2 -- it's radical!
Least favorite math joke: calling numbers radical
Second least favorite math joke: the professor I had when I was a freshman in college
Second-and-a-half favorite number: 1/243 (divide it out and get 0.00411522633744855967078189300411)
Third favorite number: the mole
Fourth favorite number: epsilon
Yet another favorite number: infinity aleph-infinity
Least favorite corporate name: Infinity
Least favorite corporation: Clear Channel
Least favorite CEO: Larry Ellison (the good folks at Enron never came up with anything this stupid)
Least favorite video game adaptation of a work by Harlan Ellison: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Least favorite work by Harlan Ellison: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Only work I've read by Harlan Ellison: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
Favorite constant: Planck's
Second favorite constant: c
Favorite organization: NASA
Second favorite organization: SimNASA
Least favorite organization: RIAA
Second least favorite organization: France
Favorite video game: The Sims and anything produced before 1986 or so
Least favorite video game: Airport Tycoon. It's been said that an infinite number of monkeys sitting at typewriters, given infinite time, would eventually produce the entire works of Shakespeare. Give eight monkeys ten minutes and they would produce this game.
Favorite animal: flatworm
Favorite color: anything Web-safe, though I have an irrational hatred of yellow, a fetish for purple, and incorrectly identify mauve 6 out of 8 times
Favorite motion: undulation
Favorite movie: Memento
Second favorite movie: anything by Luis Buñuel or Woody Allen
Least favorite movie: anything by Adam Sandler
Favorite flower: anything that is carnivorous or requires little or no watering
Favorite building: Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao
Second favorite building: Centre Pompidou in Paris
Third favorite building: Kansai Airport's terminal
Fourth favorite building: anything by Frank Lloyd Wright (the only famous person to share my birthday), Frank Gehry, or Renzo Piano
Favorite day: March 14
Favorite time: 8:08
Favorite photographer: Man Ray
Least favorite photographer: Ansel Adams (too blatantly bourgeois)
Favorite word: asymptotic
Second favorite word: anything with the prefix meta- (this, oddly enough, includes the company name Transmeta)
Least favorite word because I have to look it up every time I use it and I use it often: bourgeois
Least favorite word because it psychologically scarred me for life when I misspelled it in an elementary school spelling bee: gruel
Favorite verb: recurse
Favorite noun: recursor
Favorite adjective: recursive
Favorite adverb: recursively
Favorite sentence: Recursive recursors recurse recursively.
Second favorite sentence: Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Third favorite sentence: This sentence is false.
Least favorite sentence: anything with the name Hillary Clinton in it
Favorite dead scientist: Richard Feynman
Second favorite dead scientist: Alan Turing
Favorite living scientist: Steven Pinker
Second favorite living scientist: Douglas Hofstadter
Favorite Sea Squirt: the Pulsating Red Sea Squirt by default
Favorite sea creature that isn't the Pulsating Red Sea Squirt: bioluminescent algae
Favorite CD: Glassworks by Philip Glass
Least favorite CD: anything else by Philip Glass
Favorite books: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter, How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker, and Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman
Most overrated book: anything by Isaac Asimov
Favorite fiction author: Julio Cortázar and Franz Kafka
Favorite language: Esperanto
Least favorite language: Java
Least favorite attempt by Microsoft to deliberately screw up a language in order to get the whole world to have to buy its version of what used to be a perfectly good, independently-standardized language: C# and Java
Favorite car of all the ones I've had: Geo Storm (0-60 in 8 seconds but still gets 32 MPG; another advantage is that it's small enough to fit in my suitcase for when I don't want to rent a car at the airport)
Second favorite car of all the ones I've had: BMW 318i (I got mine before they came up with the brilliant idea of making it a hatchback)
Least favorite car: Ford Focus (naming a car after a word that has an irregular plural is a bad idea, but handing a group of preschoolers a box of crayons and telling them to design a car is even worse)
Least favorite car of all the ones I've had: Ford Escort (I've had five: one black, one white, one blue, and two red. They're like the Bic lighter of cars--if it breaks, just throw it away and buy another one)
Favorite name for a computer: Dave (like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I tend to say, "Just what do you think you're doing, Dave" to it several times a day)
Favorite name for a computer's processor: Crusoe
Favorite name for a dog: Bonehead
Favorite name for a penguin: Opus
Second favorite name for a penguin: Tux
Favorite Linux distribution: Debian
Favorite acronym: GNU
Second favorite acronym: SCSI
Third favorite acronym: GUI
Least favorite acronym: DMCA
Second least favorite acronym: CDA
Third least favorite acronym: PMRC
Favorite cities: Madrid, Boston, and any city of 10,000 people or less and at least fifty miles from the next nearest population center
Number of states I've seen: 24
Number of countries I've seen: 5, unless you consider Alabama and/or Texas to be a different country, as most Americans should be encouraged to do
Favorite thing to do on a Friday night: anything that I would do on any other day, like June 31st for example. I also like to live each day as if it's your last.
Word I am most likely to use when playing Hangman: deflexure
Word I am least likely to use when playing Hangman: a
Favorite palindrome: www.norvig.com/palindrome.html (I like really big things, like Atlas V rockets, for example, but I abhor SUV's)
Favorite way to keep in shape: I'd tell you, but then RSAC wouldn't rate me (like I care)
Favorite type of fluid: inviscid (What can I say? Eve has good taste.)
Favorite body part: mitochondria
Favorite name of a body part: Golgi apparatus
Favorite thing to stare at when I'm really tired: Mandelbrots
Religious beliefs: Ray Kurzweil is God. This may be a little disturbing to Mr. Kurzweil, but I am actually an atheist. Don't tell him or he may disappear in a cloud of the smoke of contradiction, and that would be a Bad Thing.
Favorite philosopher: Friedrich Nietzsche
Favorite quote: [You really should take a look at the navigation bar to your left. Unless you're using a browser that doesn't render this page all pretty like Opera does, in which case click here.]
Favorite thing I've ever done: jumping out of airplanes
Least favorite thing I've ever done: U.S. Army Airborne School so I could learn to jump out of airplanes
Favorite DSM-IV disgnosable thing about myself: I plan to someday have the bathroom wall closest to the tub tiled in a fractal pattern so I can have something to stare at (I tend to stay in the tub for an hour or more). I also want to wallpaper one room of my house with Piet Mondrian/Andy Warhol wallpaper. Incidentally, when I was a kid, the wallpaper in my bedroom looked a lot like Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue. (Believe it or not, I actually wrote this before I came across Eve's site.)
Last of 101 bullet points: the previous one