I don’t have some crazy or cool origin story, so let’s just talk about some things I’m interested in these days.

Food & Drink

If I'm not working or sleeping, I'm probably cooking, eating, or thinking about cooking or eating. A bunch of that turns up in my instagram stories. I also have a languishing-but-I-swear-I’ll-restart-it-any-day-now boozy instagram. Like everyone else, I have a many years defunct food blog that seems to be memorialized for all time on Tumblr.

I used to have some recs here, but per the previous sentence, I tend to let things like that go stale. Just watch my insta stories or… ask?

Conservation

I used to devote all of my "free professional time" to developing software to support animal conservation efforts. I have worked with amazing folks like Bob Lacy, Jon Ballou, Phil Miller, and Philip Nyhus developing software models to help researchers stave off the decline of populations of countless threatened and endangered species. Today, it's just a cause near and dear with periodic advice-giving and meeting attendance.

I’m a member of the Advisory Board of Trustees for the Cheetah Conservation Fund, who I’ve been lucky enough to visit in Namibia (cheetah photos here!). If you care at all about cheetahs or wildlife conservation in general you can't go wrong supporting CCF.

Photography

I've enjoyed photography since first picking up my mom's old Nikon F-series SLR as a kid (sorry for all the wasted film!). I love photographing wildlife above all, which is kind of hard in Manhattan. So I keep my skills sharp with the cats and lug camera equipment to other destinations whenever possible. Most recent work is on my instagram, casual stuff like food and cats show up in the stories, and a lot more travel and nature stuff is on my photo site at smugmug. I'm just a hobbyist for now, but I've shot a lot of photos in some really nice places and some of them have turned out well enough that the occasional person buys a print.

Sports

I was a two sport athlete in college (track and soccer) so sports in one way or another will always be quite important to me. At one time I competed at very high levels in each of my sports, but now I am firmly planted in the ex-athlete category. In grad school, I helped coach long jumpers and triple jumpers at Cornell, who were among the best in the nation for a time. When I lived in San Diego I played tennis probably 350 days a year, but sadly life in NYC is not supportive of that pass time. And since watching the Yankees and NY Giants doesn't burn any calories, I’m left with running to justify all that food.