Wordman's Writings

I'm not a writer, but occasionally throw out a word or two. Mostly, I write stuff for role-playing games, but I have written a few other things that I'm willing to share with the world (aren't you lucky). I've also thrown a few other things together:

Letters

I occasionally get irritated enough at something the write a letter about it to whoever is worth venting upon.

• After getting an incredibly irritating parking ticket in Great Neck, I sent this letter of congratulations to them for screwing me so well.
• When they used to be worth reading, I sent a letter to Wired magazine on a whim, which was published.

Lessons

Every once in a while, I needed to give a demonstration or quick lesson to people at work for one thing or another. (Part of my job has been to mentor more junior engineers.) Notes from these lessons follow:

• A spur of the moment lecture on using bitwise operations.
• After a number of years, I've come to use a coding convention designed to make code easier to debug (particularly when the person doing the debugging is not the original writer).
• After some performance tuning on a Java application, I wrote some advice to the development team on ways to speed Java up.
• Also related to Java performance, I discovered that pooling strings is completely useless.

Rants

I sometimes (usually when responding to an e-mail) just let loose a rush of typing. This doesn't happen very often, but when it does I tend to keep writing until I run out of stuff to say. Most of these rants are never seen by anyone else. These, however, are:

• Just prior to the U.S. taking military action in Afghanistan, I became momentarily obsessed with alternative strategies that might be brought to bear against al-Quada.

Academic

Even as a Computer Science major, at Harvard, you write a lot. I wrote a number of bad papers, and a few good ones. As I progressed through school, I started using "hooks" (little hidden oddities that only I knew about) in order to keep my interest up while writing.

Anyway, God knows why you would care, but here is some of my college stuff.

• Sweephand: One of my favorite papers, this architecture paper analyzes the inner space of two Las Vegas casinos. (Senior Spring)
• Them: This is a horrible paper, using just about every Bad Thing you can do in a paper. It is here only because I wrote it in a big, big hurry (about six hours), so this is what happens to my writing when I have no motivation other than a deadline. (Senior Spring)
• Bastard: The most "Harvardian" of the stuff I wrote (Rice-a-Roni reference aside), this explores the purpose of the character of Edmund in King Lear. (Senior Spring)
• An investigation of Shakespearean England's attitudes toward witchcraft in general and the mystical significance of names in particular, this paper is intentionally nameless. (Senior Spring)
• Mirrors: A treatment if how Shakespeare used of language and the idea of a play-within-a-play to have Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night's Dream comment upon each other. (Senior Fall)
• Well?: A semi-successful attempt to dive into the complexities of Twelfth Night. (Senior Fall)
• Uncertainty: Confusianism and quantum physics, oh my! (Junior Spring)
• Shards: Written during the early 1990's, when it looked like Japan was going to take over the world. (Junior Spring)
• livEEvil: Is man's nature good or evil, occording to old, dead Chinese guys? (Junior Spring)
• Over a Blood-Red Ocean: On the importance of red, blood and water to the Mayans. (Sophomore Spring)

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