Peter's Life

Obviously (or perhaps not) I'm not going to tell the whole internet all about my personal life but I'll tell you a bit about the public aspects of my non-professional life and use this as an excuse to play with FOAF and XFN. I've already mentioned going to grad school at UC Berkeley and college at caltech (some of the most fun I've ever had) but I'll add that I attended high school at Glenbrook South. When I left highschool I was actually totally convinced I was going to do physics but the nasty brute computations and the feeling I was spending more time approximating things than figuring out what was going on pushed me over to mathematics by my sophmore year in college.

Sharon Berry

Probably the most important thing happening in my life right now is my upcoming marriage to Sharon Berry. Sharon's a graduate student studying analytic philosophy (primarily philosophy of math) at Harard. If you want to see some of the things she's interested in you can visit the philosophy blog she co-authors. We are planning to have our wedding on July 20th, 2008 at Dabney Gardens, Caltech Dabney Gardens is this small little area on the caltech campus that they rent out to alumni who want to get married on campus. If you want to see what Dabney Gardens looks like and what our wedding won't be like you can take a look at the pictures from my friends' Ian and Beth's wedding. They did have one of the nicest weddings I've ever attended but neither Sharon or I want to do the whole traditional white wedding dress (I don't want to symbolize or lionize chastity) and we will probably have a smaller less ornate ceremony. Luckily that's what we want but we are sufficently disorganized and lazy that I'm concerned about our ability to pull off even this small event.

Online Presence

I spend far more of my time that I should arguing in various online forums and blog comments. I comment either under the handle TruePath (a reference to the injury method for constructions in computability theory) or logicnazi (inspired by the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld). Even though I really like the logicnazi handle some sites use dumb filters blocking anything that matches nazi and more importantly I've discovered the Seinfeld reference as well as the broader cultural phenomena of using X-nazi to refer to a pedantic or anal retentive version of X is lost on many people who aren't from the States. Since I can't always offer this explanation or count on people to realize I'm not trying to invoke the horrific genocidal regime I use both depending on the circumstances. My blog Infinite Injury (another computability reference) also takes up more of my time than it really should. In addition lately I've been procrastinating on my work by reading up about database theory (column stores, row stores, XML databases etc..) as well as programming language theory. Not to mention the time I just wasted embedding semantic content in this webpage.