Jeremy Elson's Home Page

"And it's much the same thing with knowledge,
for whenever you learn something new,
the whole world becomes that much richer."
-- The Princess of Pure Reason, as told by Norton Juster in The Phantom Tollbooth

An update from the current decade (2011)

I'm so terrible about keeping my home page up-to-date. It seems like it should be easy to just add a link every now and then, yet this page hasn't really been updated since 2003, when I was graduating and looking for a job.

I don't think I have the time, just yet, to actually reorganize all this information meaningfully. I will, instead, make do with this little prologue that both acknowledges my poor home-page hygiene and provides links to a few more recent things in my life:

I graduated with a Ph.D. in computer science from UCLA in 2003.
I've worked at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA since 2004. I even own an Xbox 360 autographed by Bill Gates.
I got married in 2008!
I very much enjoy flying airplanes, and now own one. I've flown coast-to-coast 8 times, and wrote a diary about my first time.
I've gotten into building electronics; my first major project was designing the fake avionics for a rocket ship treehouse my friend Jon and I built. It started out as some blinking lights. By the end, we'd written an operating system. MAKE Magazine published an 8-page article we wrote about it!
After 10 years of riding the same $250 mountain bike, I finally bought a road bike.

Some random projects and writings that I've put on the web recently:

I've started writing about my early experiences flying and am trying to find the time to expand the blog into a book. Some of my favorite stories: Death Vortex, The Bottle, and Anything You Ask.
Our attempt at building a self-driving boat in 36 hours
How to fix a toaster handle the hard way: with a 3D printer
Is it ever economically rational to buy tickets in the MegaMillions Lottery? (A year after writing this essay, it ended up landing me in a segment of NBC's Today Show.)
A method for measuring the shutter speed of a mechanical camera

I now return you to the home page from 2003, already in progress.

What's in a home page?

I'm never sure exactly what I should have on my home page. Every time I sit down to write something, I wonder who will be looking at it and what they might want to know. I usually spend some time looking at other people's pages, hoping to find one that has a format I like; when I can't, I just throw up my hands and decide to put off updating my home page until another day. (I guess that's why it wasn't updated for 2 years.) Some people start off by describing their current job; others talk about their research interests; others describe their hobbies or spouses. Somehow, jumping right in and talking about those things without any introduction just doesn't seem right to me. I guess I'll just start my home page with this bizarrely self-referential paragraph, instead.

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, you can read up on:

My Life Story (last updated 25 June 2003) (Yes, updated - can you believe it?): General information about me.
My Work (last updated 25 June 2003): My professional life and research interests, jobs I've held, and the somewhat-whimsical and now-defunct business I co-founded. Also, fun projects, like the control panel for a rocket ship.
My Writings (last updated 30 May 2003): Various things I've written over the years: both academic (refereed papers, presentations), and not-so-academic (fiction, humor...).
My Software (last updated 1 August 2002): Never underestimate the importance of free software! Free software makes the world a better place, and I'd hate to live in a world without it. I try to make most of my software available on the Internet -- if even a single person finds it useful, then it was worth my time in releasing it.
My Photo Album (last updated 29 December 1999): Some pictures of me, family, and friends.
My Contact Information and Travel Schedule (last updated 22 November 2004): Different ways to reach me. Note the contrived grammatical construct used to maintain consistency with the "My..." naming paradigm.
My Recent Updates (last updated 19 January 2004): A list of recent changes to my web pages.

Jeremy Elson
Last updated22 October 2004