About me

I am an economist by training, a software developer by economic necessity, and a blogger by choice. Actually, I have to qualify the “software developer” part, because, other than the work I’ve done to get this weblog up and running, I haven’t done a lot of it lately.

What I like to do most is express my opinion. And since I have a lot of interests, I have a lot of opinions on a lot of subjects. Politically, I’m an unapologetic libertarian. Philosophically, and by faith, I’m an evangelical Christian of the Calvinist sort, although I am not presently affiliated with any particular church.

My hobbies and recreational activities mostly take place outdoors. (In fact, I detest working out in a gym!) I have been an avid cyclist, on both road and trail, for many years. I have long since lost count of the number of centuries (bike rides of 100 miles or more) I have completed, but it is well over 100. And I was the founder and original event director of the Baltimore Bicycling Club’s challenging and popular Civil War Century.

Several years ago I returned to running, which I had not done for fun since high school. I have completed four marathons — and turned in times that qualified me for the Boston Marathon in two of them. I also enjoy hiking. My latest project is mapping undocumented trails; you can see (and download) some of the results here. I also used to enjoy camping, but this is one activity where age has caught up with me. Sorry, but sleeping on the ground and putting up with primitive sanitary conditions cannot compete with a soft bed, hot shower and flush toilet.

In my youth I spent a year in Vietnam, serving with the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) — and, yes, I was in combat. I mention this mainly because the experience left me with an extremely low tolerance level for bullshit. If you are looking for a reason behind my attitude — especially my attitude toward elitists — there it is.

About this site

This site was built and is maintained with the popular WordPress blogging tool. Since I am a programmer, my original intention was to write my own blogging software, but — also since I am a programmer — I decided that reinventing the wheel was not an efficient use of my time. For the same reason, I decided it was foolish to try to write my own theme from scratch. A “theme” in WordPress is like a skin in other applications — it gives a site its look and feel. There are nearly 1,200 free or open-source themes available for WordPress, all of them written by WordPress users like myself, as well as hundreds of proprietary themes that can be purchased.

With all those free themes available, it would seem I could find one perfectly suited to my purpose. Unfortunately, this was not the case. However, I found one that came very close, the “corp” theme by Dansette. I chose it because it was a simple, clean theme that is fairly easy to modify. In fact, I made so many modifications (to the header, sidebar, metadata presentation and control panel) that I have left off the footer link the author asked users of the theme to include. I did this, not to deny credit — the link is given above — but to make sure I would “own” any distortions of the author’s original vision.

About comments

I love a good argument, so comments are welcome. But please be civil: no profanity or racial slurs (unless the context requires them, say, to illustrate a point), no ad hominem arguments and no personal attacks.

When commenting, you will be asked to supply your name and a valid email address. Both are required. For your name, you may use a pseudonym, if you wish. I don’t like the practice — it encourages incivility in discourse — but I understand that people have bosses and neighbors and that they may want to remain anonymous in this intolerant age.

The first comment you submit to this site will be held for moderation and will not appear immediately. I do this to protect the site from spam. Once you have had one comment approved, subsequent comments will be published immediately.

About the display

If you are viewing this site with just about any browser other than Internet Explorer, you will see nice rounded corners on the post and sidebar displays. If you are using IE, you will, alas, see square corners.

That is because Microsoft is still behind the times. Rounded corners on block elements will be part of the forthcoming CSS3 standard, but practically every browser maker other than Microsoft has already implemented it, or a variation of it. If the past is any indication, IE still will not have rounded corners even after CSS3 becomes “official”. IE has come a long way from the days when a web developer had to create two versions of each web page — one for IE, and one for all other browsers. But it still has a long way to go.

Take my advice. Get Firefox.