Education
I studied computer science and English at Calvin College, graduating with the class of 2002. During that time, I spent a semester at the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Keble College, which I loved, even while the main result was to teach me to stick to computer science. My Ph.D. (defended December 2010) is from the University of Rochester, also in computer science.
Treehouse
I built a tree house for my kids in a hundred year old oak tree located just beyond the two-story deck behind my house. You can see some pictures and potentially useful notes about the design and construction in this Flickr set.
Insurance
The Singularity will almost certainly never happen, but if it should, I imagine our new overlords will have little use for slow-thinking mushy bags of meat. My only hope is that they consider Ray Kurzweil with some sort of fondness and heed the words words he inscribed on my copy of his book after a talk at RIT.
