Personal

Family

• Baby pictures of my sister and me.
• My wife and I met in 1993 in Rochester, NY, where we were both regulars at the weekly contra dance. Several years later in Pittsburgh, we happened to be at a big charity swing dance; we were pushed into entering the swing dance competition, and were surprised to win! ...beating out a pair of dance instructors! Not only were we particularly in sync that evening, but I think we are also simply more in love, and looked like we were having more fun.
• We have two sons: Theo (born in 1999) and Lucas (born in 2001).

House

In 2003 I felt like I was trying to hold down two full-time jobs at once, as we designed and oversaw the construction of our new house. We didn't really want a new house---we wanted a 100-year-old victorian like we had in Pittsburgh---but the timing for such a find didn't work out in Amherst, and so we decided to design a house that looks like it was built 100 years ago; (we were aiming for 1890, actually). Our wonderful architect was Richard Morse.

Other Interests

• Cooking. Especially bread baking.
• Hiking. Especially in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
• Contra Dancing. It's traditional New England Folk dancing, and it is not the same as Square Dancing. See also Yahoo's Contra Dancing links. My wife and I learned to call from Ron Buchanan during a multi-week workshop in Pittsburgh. We used to call regularly in Pittsburgh, but have only called once so far in Amherst.
• The game of Go. I learned from Dana Ballard and Patrice Simard.
• Juggling. Passing clubs. My cousin Ernie Petrides taught me to juggle balls. My wife taught me to juggle and pass clubs. We enjoy passing with our long-time friend, Joel Harris, a professional juggler who lives in Amherst.
• Photography. Although many of my Nikon lenses are mostly laying idle as I do more digital photography (but don't yet have the corresopnding digital body).
• Hacking. I guess I can't get enough of it at work, because I even do it for fun. Crazy me.
  • In 1995 Richard Stallman named me to be the chief maintainer of GNUstep, the Free Software Foundation's effort to implement NeXT's OpenStep standard. Adam Fedor took over in 1997.
  • I also hacked on libguileobjc, an interface between GNU Guile (a Scheme interpreter) and Objective C.
  • I wrote persia, a toolkit for building virtual reality environments on Rochester's SGI Onyx RealityEngine2. The kit is based on SGI's Performer library and ELK Scheme.
  • I wrote rlkit, a software library that makes it easy to test various reinforcement learning algorithms in different environments with different sensory-motor systems. It's implemented in Objective-C and Guile.