. .

About Me

Hello, I'm an engineering student at higher-education-experiment, Olin College, located in Needham, MA. My name happens to mean "onion" in German. Lately I've been hacking on awesome educational web-app: Alight Learning. Otherwise, you'll find me cross-country skiing, picking up new, random skills, dancing like a fool, and dabbling around in things that freely expose their guts (yay open-source).

The ways in which computers shape contemporary life—or burden us further—fascinate me. Building tools that work for real people is what makes me tick.

I believe that unicorns are more likely than the Higgs Boson--but support CERN and the Large Hardon Collider regardless).

Want more? :: --verbose

Things I'd like to explore

  • Vector Art
  • 3D Modeling (IE, stuff you do with Blender / 3DS Max / Maya)
  • Hardcore Agile Software Development
  • Electronic Dance Music Mixing / DJing / Mashups
  • Emacs org-mode

Desktop software I love

Topics that fascinate me

  • Human Motivation
  • Open Source
  • Mass Transit
  • Cognitive Science
  • Human Computation Excellent talk by Luis von Ahn
  • Crowdsourcing -- turning crowd activity into useful work
  • User Design
  • Memory
  • Psychology
  • Project Management
  • Monetary Incentives
  • Distribution of wealth
  • Queer studies
  • Data visualization
  • Technology and its affect on society
  • Vector art
  • Sustainability
  • Serious Games (IE Global Conflict Palestine)
  • Dystopian literature

Web-Apps I'm interested in

Project ideas I haven't gotten around to (yet)

  • RFID catalog system for Olin's Electrical Stockroom
    Hardware purchased already
    Would focus on expensive equipment like oscilloscopes
    Needs slick interaction to be used by students
    "So easy there is not excuse not to use"
    Possibly in combination with image sensors or weight sensors to automatically detect stock that is consumed/depleted
  • Topical cryotherapy to increase exercise performance
    Hardware purchased
    Combine cryotherapy pad / glove during regular exercise
    Should increase output of individual
    More research needed
    Metric needed
  • Personal temperature control for increased building efficiency
    Why heat and cool buildings huge office buildings to exact temperatures
    Take cues from Nasa and cryotherapy to provide topical temperature control
    Energy savings calculations needed
  • Linux cross-distro code comparision (diff)
    Software is inconsistent between linux distributions
    Remove some of the double-effort of maintaining packages in each distribution by making codebase and packages from each distro easily comparable
    Much research needed!
  • Designy Keyboard based ToDo Web-app
    TeuxDeux is a great designy to-do app
    TeuxDuex suggests a simple, clear usage
    TeuxDuex fails epically at having keyboard shortcuts / being blazing fast
    Make own app w/ GWT?