I'm a retired software engineer, having worked in the medical and financial fields, living in Philadelphia, where I've been (in the metro at least) most of my life. In walking distance of City Hall now (it's a decent walk though) and filling my time with music, computing projects, reading, photography, and travel.
For the music part of my life, what you'll see here is a fusion with the computing side mostly, but I'm also active with the St. Mark's Parish Choir and Mendelssohn Chorus. Mendelssohn is by far the largest choir I've ever sung with, and is a stretch as my music preferences tend toward small ensembles rather than large ones.
In classical music, we call small ensembles "chamber music" which for reasons I don't understand, seems to turn people off. It is delightful music. Mahan Esfahani playing Bach on the harpsichord, a string quartet at Marlboro Music playing Britten's Quartet No. 2, Kronos Quartet playing live to accompany a documentary film about the ensemble. These are some of the most delightful performances ever. Different from the likes of Red Baraat, Trombone Shorty, or Cory Henry, who also put on shows that are delightful, but decidely not classical. PCMS and Marlboro Music are amazing organization presenting some of the best small ensembles you'll hear anywhere. If you're in Philadelphia, take advantage of PCMS or if you can get to Vermont in the summer, do it.
But I digress...
St Mark's Episcopal Church is an Anglo-Catholic parish across the street from the renowned Curtis Institute of Music, just down Locust Street from Rittenhouse Square which is very dedicated to sacred music, ranging from the Renaissance to today. The meat and potatoes are the music of Stanford, Howells and their contemporaries, but there's a lot of variety and intentional diversity (a lot of women composers are performed, we're working on non-white).
My reading splits among a few categories, non-fiction is well represented, science fiction and mysteries, literary fiction and short stories are all in there. A few years back I started keeping a log of what I've read, mostly for my own use to be able to recall books I wanted to refer back to. That expanded to more notes, and a shared end of year list some folks seem to like, so now I'm writing up biweekly summaries of books read and in progress.
My wife, Gwynne, and I spend many weekends walking with our cameras and photographing birds, and anything else that tickles our fancy. This has built up into a fairly large catalog of images, including a few good ones. I'm sharing some of the good ones.
The software/techie stuff pervades it all, from building software to turn live data into music (that was Twitter feed data initially, but with all the Twitturmoil, I'm working on different streaming data, probably weather data, but that is in process), to this site you are engaging with now. I will be posting (eventually) some things largely because they are things I wish I'd been able to find when googling. How to set up the photo galleries, for example. And anything to make dealing with JACK Audio Connection Kit easier. I'm honestly not sure if JACK is extremely finicky and poorly documented, or just so poorly documented that it seems finicky, but either way, writing about it may help someone else avoid some of the pain of wrangling it.