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this is where i try to condense everything that you need to know about me into a single page.
note: i don't really keep this page up to date. expect stale information. i usually do a better job maintaining my profiles elsewhere: facebook, flickr, last.fm, friendster, 43things, 43places, del.icio.us.
born in 1978. i moved from rural maine to manhattan in 1999 and i'm loving it.
in person i'm quiet and shy. my personality type is intp, which basically means that i love thinking really abstractly and solving puzzles but i'd rather not be bothered with troublesome details and i'll happily let someone else actually implement my ideas. i hate mornings. i can't stand crowds and am very uncomfortable in large groups of unfamiliar people. paperwork is the bane of my existance.
tall (185.5cm [over 6 ft.]) thin (77kg [around 170 lbs] but fluctuates down during periods of poverty or stress). blue eyes (i have an astigmatism. used to wear glasses but got contacts recently) dark hair (currently buzzed. previously kind of shaggy. previously buzzed. previously very long). my ethnic background is "european mutt" with swedish being the largest identifiable chunk. no less than 5 different people have mistaken me for asian. i'm not sure why. i have a tendency to wear lots of black clothes and combat boots but generally don't put much effort into being fashionable. my aesthetic preferences run towards minimalism and clean functional design.
i'm a vegetarian (not vegan. someday maybe, but i like cheese). i eat lots of bagels, salad, bean burritos and falafel. i inherited from my father (and i suspect the swedish parts of my ancestry) the ability to eat pretty much the same thing every day for unlimited periods of time without getting tired of it. although i also love to try strange new foods whenever the opportunity arises (eg, i had pig brains and other even stranger cuisine in china back before i was a vegetarian). i periodically battle a raging caffeine addiction. currently, i haven't had any since april of 2001. i'm a chronic insomniac. i have a driver's license but don't drive if i can possibly avoid it (car accident when i was 18 freaked me out. manhattan is a good place for me to live because of this).
in May of 2001, i finished a Computer Engineering degree at Columbia University. i previously slept through classes at (yet somehow managed to graduate from) Bates College, Nanjing University, and mssm.
i work as a programmer at The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, where i specialize in buzzword compliance and occasionally pretend to be a designer. we build a lot of web-based, database driven applications and a few random desktop apps. these days i try to write as much of it as possible in python, i'm dabbling in the world of plone, i still maintain some old perl code and i'm sometimes called on to work with other random languages.
i'm passionate about a great many things and continually learning about the things that interest me. some examples:
i maintain and write for thraxil, a community weblog/discussion area. if anything important is going on with me, you'll hear it there first. plus, it's an excellent place to waste lots of time. go there.
i'm a member of the WaSP, doing our part to keep the web open to all.
i'm the resident industrial and metal guy on music (for robots), an mp3 blog that some college friends and i started in the spring of 2004. It got popular, won a bunch of awards, but I got interested in other things and haven't been around there much lately.
i've been on the webdesign-l listserv run by steve champeon almost since the very beginning.
in my spare time i like to draw/paint and play my guitars.
little known trivia and factoids about anders. who knows, maybe someday Jeopardy will have an "anders" category and you'll be thankful that you read this. it could happen.