he Author:

s you can see, I don't photograph easily. But rest assured, I'm looking for a good picture that shows my good side more than anything else.

Currently, I am a graduate student at the University of Washington. I am chasing a masters degree in the civil engieering department. My thesis/project involves the nondestructive analysis of roads using a falling weight deflectometer. In a nutshell, you drop a big weight on the road and record how the road deflects. Currently, the analysis performed on this involves taking the peak deflection and correlating that with the stiffness. I am trying to use the entire displacement vs. time trace in the hope that there's more information in there than just the peak deflection. I am hoping to graduate sometime this coming spring.

I attended Cornell University as an undergraduate in Civil Engineering, and met some really cool people there. Some of the work I did there can be seen in the Scanning Electron Microscope images of cement paste. While I was there, I picked up a lot of interesting influences, like Matt Ruff, two classes of shakespeare, and a understanding that things are rarely the way that they seem. It also taught me that my needs, wants, desires, viewpoints, and ideas are not normally that of the majority of the population. I tell myself this every time that I think I have found something that everybody is going to find indespensible in 5 years. Rule #1, asking yourself if you find it useful does not constitute market research.

I also attended an interesting high school, The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, but that was long long ago in a galaxy far far away. I'm not sure that I really remember all the things that I did there, other and a whole lot of homework. Also looking at their index of classmates, I realize that a significant number of them are getting married. Yikes.

lot of the content on this site may seem a bit cynical. An explanation is somewhat in order. While I am an engineer, I have a weakness for things that I believe will revolutionize the world. I had that feeling a few years ago when I was playing around with the net. I felt that the barriers to a worldwide audience had fallen, the only problem was that the penetration was rather shallow. Most of what was out there was content. Usenet groups were mostly content. Spam was few and far between.

Now, there are millions of pages on the web. This in itself is a good thing. But we're stuck in the middle. There are lots of sites that have content, but it seems that the ones that are big are run by the same people who bring you the mainstream media. So the litle guy gets drowned by the volume of the broadcast from next door.

Part of it may be that there is very little in the way of courtesy anymore. Usenet was always known for flame wars, but there seems to be less and less well reasoned argumentation and more mailbombing, denial of service attacks, Spam, meow, and other such crap. I have, with some reluctance, decided that it is no longer reasonable to maintain an open mailbox. Some commercial entities think that it is a right and fair use to cram my maillbox fill of their advertising. Well, there are now some domains that cannot mail me. Their mail will get either bounced or dropped in the bit bucket.

Another part of it may be that now that the net is popular, there is a need to be on it. Several years ago, it was just those who really wanted to be there (and a bunch of college freshmen every September), but now if you don't have a corporate presence on the net, you are behind the times.

But enough of all this complaining. If you have any original ideas on what is good and what will save this community that is getting bigger every month, mail me. I'd love to hear your ideas.