But first, a story...

When I was applying for admission to undergraduate institutions, I chose two engineering schools, and one liberal arts school. The two engineering schools I chose because I was interested in computers, and wanted to go to a top school in computer science. The third school was a small liberal arts college in Oregon.

At the time, I would have preferred to have gone to either of the two engineering schools. Despite this, I was only able to make the waiting lists for both, while I was accepted at the third school, Willamette University. This turned out to be fortunate for me, for it allowed a side of me that I think is vital to flourish. I had chosen Willamette as my third choice because it appealed to a different side of me -- the side that was interested in the connections between things. The side that wanted to know about how a humanist would engineer, and how a computer could deal with realms slippier than computing.

In the end I have been well served by attending a liberal arts college. I have been able to pursue many orthogonal interests simultaneously (as well as receive a strong computer science education, which has prepared me well for graduate school).

One area into which a good subset of my interests tend to fall is, unsurprisingly, computer science. There are three major aspects to this fascination: communication, cognition, and systems.

Communication is the cornerstone. It is this which re-kindled my flagging interest in the computer. As a member of the first generation to grow up with personal computers, I have been around computers since the fourth grade. By the time I was a senior in high school, I could program a computer in several different languages, and just didn't care any more. The computer was a neat toy, but an awfully self-contained one. By itself it was just a box with nifty flashing lights.

As a freshman in college, I signed up for a computer course simply because I did not know what else I would be good at. It was not a freshman course, and most of my classmates were already familiar with local computing facilities; so, when the professor began talking about "e-mail accounts," I was one of the few in the class who did not know what he was talking about. By the end of the semester, I finally got around to getting the account . . . right about the same time the school got a whopping 57.6Kbit/sec connection to the Internet (which now, four years later, is only twice as fast as my dial-in modem at home can connect to the Internet at).

The Internet revolutionized my thinking about computers. Sure, by themselves, they were still just boxes, but when you run a wire out the back . . . you get a whole new strange and wonderful world. Since that point, networking resources and applications have formed the focal point of my fascination with the machine.

A related topic to communication and computers is hypertext. The World Wide Web is probably the most familiar example, these days, and I have wasted no end of time playing with aspects of it. My copy of Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Nelson) has rarely had the chance to get dusty. Two aspects of hypertext which especially fascinate me have so far failed to be addressed significately on the Web: collaborative authoring and authoritativeness.

I've also become recently fascinated with so-called "old media": printing, page design, and typography. Recently I bought a cheap laser printer, which instantly turned me into that beast that all good subversives want to be -- a press. Both online and offline. Yow! Between these, and the fact that I've infiltrated the traditional printing establishment to the extent that I've published two books, means that this lil' ol' twerp is reaching millions of people a year, without having to shave or get out of his bathrobe. Beat that, Ben Franklin.

The computer is also fascinating as a tool for exploring cognition. At the one end of the spectrum are the questions of machine learning: ways in which neural nets and genetic algorithms can produce complex and interesting behaviour from simple algorithms, and how they can learn and adapt to environments with overt prediction from the programmer. At the other end is how the computer can act not just as a word processor, but as an information processor, augmenting human cognition and allowing us to think in new and different ways.

Finally, my real love in computer science is in systems work. The details of implementing operating systems and networks fascinate me. I've done work with object-based microkernels and with distributed computation, and it's fun stuff all the way around. This will be the focus of my graduate work; my thesis will undoubtedly involve operating systems and networks in some form or another. And this interest comes back again to communication and cognition, because I plan to explore frameworks for shipping functions so that you can intelligently filter data before pumping it across your (never large enough) 'net connection.

The social sciences are another area which fascinate me. Naturally, I'm fascinated with history (being a major), but I'm also intrigued by sociology, political science, economics, and literature, and plan to take advantage of my remaining two years here at Willamette to dabble in all of these areas. As I progress, I become more and more convinced that everything is, in fact, fundamentally and deeply intertwined. Plus, what good is it to know how to use the technology, if you don't have a conception of the broader societal context within which the technology will be used? And vice versa?

Another important area of interest is music. I have played the euphonium since the fifth grade, which means I've well over a decade of musical experience and training. I enjoy listening as well as performing, from jazz, the blues, classical, and rock (which makes Zeppelin a natural choice, eh?).

Finally, there is a need for re-enchantment. What I am really after was the ability to maintain my sense of wonder in a world where concrete has become the superstructure of nature, and soulless machines provide the infrastructure for our interactions. I hope I'm on that path to this enlightenment -- but I'll continue to chop wood and carry water, just the same.