It's a wonder I have any time to sleep | |
Work |
harmonix
I work at Harmonix Music
Systems, developing the coolest music software ever made. No,
really. Visit the web site for more info.
looking glass Before I joined Harmonix, I worked for 5+ years at the computer game company Looking Glass Technologies (which turned into Looking Glass Studios and now sadly is no more) and its predecessor Blue Sky Productions. I was a member of the core team on Ultima Underworld, doing lots of programming (including AI & physics) while also being responsible for a lot of the design, including writing the plurarity of the text and integrating everybody's contributions. Ultima Underworld was elected to the Computer Gaming World Hall of Fame a few years back. I worked on a few different projects after that, including cowriting the music to Ultima Underworld II and working some on System Shock's physics, but my main achievement at Looking Glass was as project leader on Terra Nova, an outdoor 3D squad-based shooter. A few years back, Terra Nova was named the 15th best game of all time by the British edition of PC Gamer, and even I think that's a bit high, although the game is pretty damn good, thank you.
m.i.t. Before all that, I went to school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Music Composition. |
Music |
honest bob
Well, of course, I lead the band Honest Bob & The Factory-to-Dealer
Incentives, but you probably saw that on my front page.
Honest Bob has been going strong since 1992. In May 2000 we finally
completed our full-length CD, It's Not
As Bad As I'm Making It Sound; buy it today! Or at least
listen to our MP3s.
gamelan galak tika I also play in a local Balinese gamelan, Gamelan Galak Tika. A gamelan is an Indonesian percussion orchestra. The music is great, and lots of fun to play. Come see us some time; it's quite a spectacle. I had the privilege of writing a composition for the gamelan, titled A Dangerous Thing, which was performed at the Bang On A Can Marathon among other concerts, and a link to a radio broadcast of the piece can be found on my compositions page. compositions Other than that piece, I haven't written any "serious" music (i.e., in the classical tradition) in a few years, but I have a lots of ideas kicking around in my head and maybe a few of them will escape sometime. I have a bunch of older pieces for piano, or piano and voice, that perhaps I will put up on the web at some point in the future. I have now at least created a compositions page with some info about them. and a whole lot more Besides all that, music is, like, the best thing in the world, so I spend a lot of time listening to my zillion CD's, analyzing scores, or reading books about music history and analysis. Maybe at some point I'll construct a list of my faves, or put up some mini-reviews. As a start, here's my list of favorite recent rock albums. |
Reading | fiction, mostly After a dip due to spending too much free time in front of a computer, my fiction consumption has been going back up. I manage to go through a steady diet of books, largely a mix of contemporary novels (the post-moderner the better) and classics (so that I feel like a good member of Western civilization). I started keeping a book diary to keep track of what I've read, and it's grown to be pretty extensive. |
Games |
chess
I learned to play chess when I was three, and although I gave it up
for a long time, I'm now playing again on and off, and my USCF rating
is a respectable 1769. My handle on the Internet Chess Club is dfan.
go Recently I've been playing the Asian boardgame Go a lot, so my chess skills have been slipping. After Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov at chess, Go was in the news a bit as the game in which humans are still much better than computers. My Go rank is 5 kyu according to the American Go Association, which basically means I'm 5 steps away from being an expert (at that point, I would become 1 dan and the numbers would start going up). If you know anything about go, you know that means I've already wasted far too much time studying this game. My handle on the No Name Go Server is dfan. I also highly recommend the more recent Kiseido Go Server, which has a snazzier interface that makes it easier to do things like teach. When NNGS and KGS are down, I play on the Internet Go Server, but I prefer NNGS and KGS, as they're friendlier, free to everyone, and their rating system is better. If you are interested in Go, the place to get started is Mindy MacAdams' page. The definitive page of Go links is Ken Warkentyne's. interactive fiction On the creation side of the games topic, I've recently become involved in the interactive fiction community, writing text adventures. One of them, For A Change, even won an award. My IF stuff is over here. diplomacy Most recently, I've started playing the board game Diplomacy by email. Diplomacy is a seven-player game in which everyone tries to take over the world, which usually involves a lot of negotiation and even more back-stabbing. It turns out to be uncannily suited to email play, where you can negotiate as verbosely as you like over a period of months rather than trying to cram a whole game into a single day. The Diplomatic Pouch is the place to go if you're interested, and once you are, I've written some handy tools which I have here. |
Sports |
ultimate
Like all good athletic nerds, I like to play Ultimate Disc (Ultimate
Frisbee, if you must be vulgar about it). I play in the Boston Ultimate Disc Alliance's
Summer League every year.
running As of 2000, I've also started running regularly. Current bests: distance, 8.2 miles; speed, 5 mile race in 36 minutes. I was afraid that running would be really boring, but it turns out to be a nice time to think, and I've been doing a lot of my songwriting during that time. |
Other | &cetera I tend to get really excited about something every six months or so. Some interests which have since faded a bit (but I still revisit from time to time) are Esperanto, combinatorial game theory, and generative linguistics. These days I'm learning Latin. Perhaps you'd like to suggest a new obsession? |