I am new to the area and looking for friends.

I'm laid back and really easy to get along with. I am a big nerd, but fairly outgoing. I love to meet new people and try different things.

I work for a software company in the engineering industry and get to exercise my love of engineering, math, computers, and other nerdy stuff there. I am really curious about the world around me and how things work, so engineering has been a great fit.

I love live music (just about any genre), especially small to medium venues, and going to any kind of event where I know I get to see something unique. I love good beer and fine wine and fancy liquor, though almost always in small doses. I enjoy camping and backpacking and really look forward to seeing nature out here. I go for just about any kind of ethnic food I can get. Overall, I like getting out there and seeing something new for me or special or different or alive, and I'm not easily disappointed when things are mediocre so long as I get to experience something real.

I really enjoy language learning and have studied or started to learn quite a few, but none have gotten as far as I'd like. With a little more practice I can probably get my Spanish back to a reasonable level. I studied Portuguese briefly, but it came easy because of all the similarities to Spanish, though my pronunciation is hopeless. I did Arabic for a while and know a decent bit of grammar and a little vocabulary, but almost everything I know is so formal I have lots of trouble when I try to talk to my Arab friends. I learned some Persian from various friends and really like it; I'd like to get deeper into that. I've taken a couple other languages, but retained so little they're not worth mentioning. I'm not being humble when I say English is all I can speak.

I'm too cynical to get very into politics, though I'm passionate about a weird issue here and there, most of them probably being nerd causes—civil liberties, reasonable intellectual property laws, and that jazz.

I really don't know what to say in here, so I guess I'll wrap this up.

Like I said, I just moved up here for work. It's a pretty academic setting, but I think I may still want go get my PhD and get into academia in a few years. We'll see.

On a personal level, I hope for a lot of growth. I have a passion for languages but am hopelessly undisciplined on my own, and am hoping to find classes or people up here to help me stay honest.

I also hope to travel more. I've seen a lot of the US and hope that traveling abroad becomes easier with finally getting a grownup job, though that's probably in large part a cop out.

I love to read. I'd love to love to read great literature more, but I'm a bit too easily bored most of the time. Some of my favorite books:
- 1984 by George Orwell, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and most any other dystopia
- Anything by Donald Knuth
- Native Sun by Richard Wright
- Nonlinear Finite Elements for Continua and Structures by Belytschko, Liu, and Moran
- Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman by Mr Feynman (Dr Richard Feynman)
- The Harry Potter series by JK Rowling
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, despite being painfully slow
- Calvin and Hobbes strips!

I'm not really too into movies.

My musical tastes are pretty broad. Random artists I've listened to in the last few days: Bob Dylan, The LA Philharmonic, The Decemberists, Wilco, 2Pac, Jimi Hendrix, Bishop Allen, Pantera, Benny Goodman, Jimmy Cliff

I love all kinds of food. I like to cook and to eat out, especially at local restaurants. I love most kinds of ethnic food and am willing to try almost anything.

Science, Engineering, Graphic Design, Product Design, Technology, Computers, Languages, Comparative sociology, Comparative Lingustics, Ethics, Art, Music, Wine, Beer, Society, History, People, Psychology, How things work and why people do what they do, LOLcats

If you feel like it, I guess. If you want to IM me, that probably means I would want to IM you back. I'm mainly looking for friendship and am always glad to get to know all sorts of awesome people.