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Escape to a Spoonoid Planet
Permanent Account Created on 4 April 2001 (#92044) Last updated on 5 September 2015
Name:
Mandrew
Location:
I don't really post to this journal much, and very rarely is it informative. The links are funny, though.
I enjoy referring to myself in the third person, and will do so now.
A Brief Autobiography:
Mark was raised in Glendale, CA. In high school he excelled at Latin, but was otherwise a lackluster student, failing math classes and getting only slightly above average grades in all other classes. These grades were somehow enough to get him into UC Santa Cruz, where he pursued his knack for grammar by getting a degree in theoretical linguistics. During this time, he enjoyed significant excursions into computer science, transcendental math, philosophical logic, and the Japanese language. He also did brief stints of coursework in Ancient Greek, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Spanish, and the history and basic theory of electronic music.
He soon fell into a job as an orthographic transcriptionist for Tellme, a Silicon Valley technology startup which used speech recognition to create interactive telephone-based voice applications. Over time, he made sure his responsibilities became more varied and technical. As of late 2005, he had become a de facto software engineer. In 2007 that startup was bought by a bigger startup, called Microsoft.
After two years at Microsoft, watching Tellme's corporate culture pulled away agonizingly like nothing more than a scab, he left for greener horizons [ed: wait, what's up with that metaphor? where's the editor for this POS biography?] to become an in facto software engineer at personal data management and sharing company Memeo. After 10 short months, he left Memeo due to catastrophic layoffs.
Coming out of college, he was briefly confused by the open-endedness of adulthood--not knowing what to do with the little free time and the little free money that working left him with. His solution was to try out a variety of things that piqued his interest, like contact juggling, chainmail weaving, yoga, social dance, stiltwalking, rock climbing, and motorcycling.
He's also enjoyed taking Computer Science and math classes for the beauty inherent in the provably true, the unreal cleverness that well-optimized algorithms imply about human thought, and how computation methods can be generalized to solve problems from many different domains. He considers these studies the gateway not only to a well-stocked toolbox, but also as a source of wonder and inspiration.
Sometimes, when I look at myself through the microscope of cold, hard objectivity, I think to myself, "God, you are awesome!"
--from Overheard In New York
If you're on one of my filters, and are wondering who else is on that filter (to avoid mortifying social situations, perhaps?), I've posted the member lists for all my friends groups on 2001/04/03 23:59. Those posts are updated by a perl script, so they should reflect whatever ill-pruned state the groups were in when I last ran the script.
Another useful link: all the LJ markup in one place
I enjoy referring to myself in the third person, and will do so now.
A Brief Autobiography:
Mark was raised in Glendale, CA. In high school he excelled at Latin, but was otherwise a lackluster student, failing math classes and getting only slightly above average grades in all other classes. These grades were somehow enough to get him into UC Santa Cruz, where he pursued his knack for grammar by getting a degree in theoretical linguistics. During this time, he enjoyed significant excursions into computer science, transcendental math, philosophical logic, and the Japanese language. He also did brief stints of coursework in Ancient Greek, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Spanish, and the history and basic theory of electronic music.
He soon fell into a job as an orthographic transcriptionist for Tellme, a Silicon Valley technology startup which used speech recognition to create interactive telephone-based voice applications. Over time, he made sure his responsibilities became more varied and technical. As of late 2005, he had become a de facto software engineer. In 2007 that startup was bought by a bigger startup, called Microsoft.
After two years at Microsoft, watching Tellme's corporate culture pulled away agonizingly like nothing more than a scab, he left for greener horizons [ed: wait, what's up with that metaphor? where's the editor for this POS biography?] to become an in facto software engineer at personal data management and sharing company Memeo. After 10 short months, he left Memeo due to catastrophic layoffs.
Coming out of college, he was briefly confused by the open-endedness of adulthood--not knowing what to do with the little free time and the little free money that working left him with. His solution was to try out a variety of things that piqued his interest, like contact juggling, chainmail weaving, yoga, social dance, stiltwalking, rock climbing, and motorcycling.
He's also enjoyed taking Computer Science and math classes for the beauty inherent in the provably true, the unreal cleverness that well-optimized algorithms imply about human thought, and how computation methods can be generalized to solve problems from many different domains. He considers these studies the gateway not only to a well-stocked toolbox, but also as a source of wonder and inspiration.
Sometimes, when I look at myself through the microscope of cold, hard objectivity, I think to myself, "God, you are awesome!"
--from Overheard In New York
If you're on one of my filters, and are wondering who else is on that filter (to avoid mortifying social situations, perhaps?), I've posted the member lists for all my friends groups on 2001/04/03 23:59. Those posts are updated by a perl script, so they should reflect whatever ill-pruned state the groups were in when I last ran the script.
Another useful link: all the LJ markup in one place
acoustic phonetics, algorithms, amber chronicles, amber drpg, attic greek, batman: the animated series, chainmail weaving, computational theory, contact juggling, d&d, george orwell, get your war on, gödel, information security, inventing obscure interests, japanese, linguistics, logic, mc frontalot, mc lars, nin, paradoxes, perl, proofs, qwantz, rendaku, roger zelazny, rules lawyering, rurouni kenshin, sealab 2021, set theory, sonority sequencing generalization, space ghost, the tick, ucsc, use strict, yoga