ABOUT :: the color of steve thomas's socks and other important information

NEW! I am engaged to the beautiful and brilliant Tandy Chalmers.

The goal of this page is to learn everything you can above Steve in 5 minutes or less. Ready? Go!

(Before we get started, let me explain the format of this page. Since I am a visual learner, a graph or chart is much more valuable than buckets o' text. So below is a notional timeline of some major activities of my life. Even further down the page you will find some relationships between these activities. The page concludes with a list of random facts that I thought of one day.)





There are known issues and errata with the above graph, but since this page was rejected from submission to the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, you're just gonna have to live with it.

The graph represents the relationships betwen the major activities of my life. Note that despite initial appearances of cool, busy arrows, none of the relationships identified above are particularly profound, and some may not even be correct. Nevertheless, the colored arrows and boxes look fun, at least on my monitor.

For more serious information, see the work and academic sections.

Other fun facts about me:

• I am a member of RMS's Wine Enthusiast Club.
• I speak German, and studied the language in Dresden and Mosbach (Heidelberg) for a summer.
• I am a huge fan of the vi text editor. Emacs users just haven't thought it through.
• The nickname "McDoofus" and all of its derivatives are a result of a simple statement made by Timothy Bryce in the first scene of the movie American Pyscho. Bryce was instulting Craig McDermott, and formulated a clever combination of Craig's last name and the word "doofus". Since it was my favorite movie at the time, and my partner-in-crime already had the handle "McNUTT ALOT", it made sense.
• I enjoy collecting clocks and watches.
• I ran the SAR Meet Me Downtown 5K and finished in the top 15%.
• I find strange satisfaction in creating lists of things.
• I prefer bash, Perl, and Java to their competitors.
• I own entirely too many striped shirts.
• I struggled for a long while deciding between Mathematics and Computer Science as the subject to pursue in Graduate school.
• I enjoy my coffee black (and with cream from time to time!), and cannot drink iced tea.
• Law and Order is the only TV show I watch with any regularity.
• I created this website using only vi and Photoshop. However, all the content is stored in XML format and some scripts I wrote (you guessed it - in bash) run them through Xalan's XSLT to create the HTML you see here.
• I own four (4) potato peelers - one for each of the female members of my family who thought I needed one as a house warming gift.
• Because of this sentence, I am inconsistent with ending my sentences with periods in this list

One last thing before we're done. The very handsome baby boy in the header above is my nephew Brody. He's a trooper and a pooper. In fact, given the expression on his face in the picture, it is likely that he was trooping and pooping at the very moment the picture was taken. I also have a nephew named Caden, who is currently planning on challenging his Uncle Steve to a soccer match, with unrealistic hopes of success.