Welcome to Irvine

So I finally get around to adding something.
I'll be writing about life in Irvine,
California. Its in Orange County. And
I'll be writing about my life: I'm
an engineer, got a wife kid & cat. I've
got a Master's degree and a bachelors in
computer science and also in cognitive
science. I'm fairly eccentric though
over the years I've moderate how much
of this is exposed. Ie, mastered social
camoflage a bit better. I'm an atheist
and these days quite religious about it;
I've stopped and removed religious symbols
(those T-shaped roman
torture devices) from state-owned
property when people set up shrines
roadside. I leave the rest of the shrine
to a poor driver.

One night I even removed an unauthorized
pro-Iraq "war" memorial erected at the
local library/park grounds. Erecting
such a thing is vandalism, and I was
cleaning up Irvine. Heh. Of course,
that was a thousand military corpses ago,
you remember, back when the mission was
accomplished, before the government endorsed
torture (ie personal terrorism),
though it was well on the way to shredding
the Bill of Rights.

I'm a libertarian by the way. Reformed
Objectivist. A sleeper cell for the
Constitution.

Fascinated with tech, and tech's impact
on society; and with hard science, including
geology, meterology, the former a hobby.
And physics and bio; the former a hobby,
I suppose, since I play with Geiger counters
and other rad-related things, high voltage,
the usual stuff. My 5-year old has played
with metal you can melt in hot water, that
kind of thing.

A cypherpunk, which is a nice cross between
libertarian and comp-sci technologist.
I've even been paid a few times to do crypto,
both hardware (alas, neither of 2 projects
went to silicon) and software (actually
coming to a photocopier at a Kinko's near you).
I have a few patents in the works, owned by
my employers. One involves hashing, and
amusingly I had a chunk o' hash at the time.
I've been into cannabinoids for about half
my life, smoking daily, though I haven't
in over a year now. Mostly I imbibe
ethanol now.

Most people confuse pharmacology with
culture, you know. If you drink bourbon
you must like Sinatra; if you drink
Coors you must like 'Merkin football;
if you toke you must be a hippie.
Well, I do like Hendrix etc and recognize
that the 60's was a Renaissance, but I
just lost out on being old enough for
the 60s and so synthesized my own eclectic culture. I tripped with engineers
in college & grad school; toked while
reading engineering stuff (as well as the
usual listening to music, hiking, etc.),
and regard pharms as tools, power tools
in some cases.

Now I drink beer, sometimes wine, rarely
stronger, and smoke cigarette tobacco from
a pipe. Concentrated EtOH I can consume
to amnesic levels, not good, neither is
being hung over.

Beer was once a way to preserve the surplus
of grain that evolving agriculture produced.
Liquid bread. Few realize this now.

Ok, enough now. For next time: Irvine,
the Disneyland of Suburbia, and its twisted
underbelly.