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About Me

Hello there. I'm Matt. I'm a humanist nerd.

The author's headshot; looking at the camera, faint half-smirk, receding hairline, brown hair green eyes.

That's me! And that's a Peter Hurley headshot, of all things.

Computers

I like computers.

My Mom's a software engineer, and at Christmas 1982 she and my Dad brought home a TRS-80 Color Computer, and when I discovered that the only way to DO anything with that device was to learn Color Basic and write your own programs, that's exactly what I did.

In the summer of 1991, I took a three-week class in Turbo Pascal at Northwestern University's Center for Talent Development, and discovered that you can put headphones on and progarm effectively. That pretty much decided what my career trajectory was going to be.
In early 1994, I programmed a TI-85 Graphing Calculator to handle recording cuts and measurements in a meat-packing plant. I was paid $500 for the work, which in inflation-adjusted dollars would be $7.2m today. The interesting thing about that project is that TI-85s have 56K of user-addressable RAM.
There are two natural reactions to that kind of constraint, and it's almost a personality test:

  • What is the coolest thing I can do in 56K?
  • What sorts of cool things could I do with 112K?

I fell decidedly into the second camp, which is how I managed to avoid getting stuck in the mobile app development niche, because I have always wanted bigger and faster computers that do more and more.

The Arts

My parents' first date was "Yellow Submarine", so I was always destined to be a bit of a musical enthusiast. My Dad plays guitar, although I must disappoint him to say that I didn't think Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" was much of a lullaby. I played the viola from 5th-12th grades, and it turns out I am exactly as good at music as one can be with hard work, a deep love of music, a tin ear, and absolutely no spark of musical genius whatsoever. Some of us were meant to be Salieri.

I am a voracious and omnivorous reader. I was hyperlexic and started in early, and I haven't ever stopped. I'll be porting over my book reviews from Goodreads onto this site over the next few weeks (and if it's past Feb of 2026 when you're reading this, um, sorry. The best novel ever written is "The Winter of our Discontent" by John Steinbeck. The Scholomance is not just the best series of books about a wizarding school, it is the best series of books that includes a character named Galadriel. My computers are named after banger book series: Scholomance for my mac desktop, Murderbot for my x86 desktop, Culture for my macbook pro, Altered Carbon for a thinkpad, etc. etc. The NAS is named Discworld because of course it is.

A Brief Note on my Politics

All human beings are equal, and have inalienable human rights. That this statement is in any way controversial is the source of constant, overwhelming rage.