I'm a climber, longboarder, and runner. I'm also a busy professional at a software startup that's about to go nuclear. I read omnivorously. When it comes to language, I am something of a prescriptivist. I'm stubbornly agnostic. I have a fascination with Victoriana, cultural imperialism, and massive scale feats of engineering and construction. I love to explore the city's nooks and crannies, and discover its history and heritage. I have been seduced recently by the beguiling notion of the technological singularity. Some people think my humour tends to be dry.

Professionally, I'm trying to build a great software team. Financially, I'm trying to save up enough to retire. Personally -- well, I'm looking for friendship, and love, and companionship.

Literature
-----------
In terms of the Western canon, you can't really go wrong with Shakespeare and Dickens. I love Dickens because of his fusty moral pedanticism and his incessantly complex sentence structures.

My favorite contemporary author is Thomas Pynchon. I love his sprawling, eccentric, brilliant, tangential, ludicrous mind. I'm also a big fan of Jeanette Winterson's early work. She has a pure, adroit command of the language that I truly envy. Her ability to communicate the complexity of desire enchants me every time.

I read a lot of science fiction as well. Yes it's nerdy. But there has been a lot of important work produced in the genre recently; it's not all space ships and death rays. Specifically there have been a considerable number of novels which concern themselves with the idea of a technological singularity. Karl Schrader, Charles Stross, and Vernor Vinge among them.

My favorite author is actually Philip K. Dick. He's become quite a popular subject of literary analysis in the last decade, which irks me because I liked his stuff well before that and I have that affliction where I can't stand to see my obscure tastes turning mainstream. He was such a creative mind. What I love most about him was the fact that he was a pulp writer exploding with original ideas and notions. He wrote so many crappy books that he churned out to meet the rent, but in each one there is at least one passage that really twists your sense of the universe. The two themes he consistently writes about, the nature of reality and the nature of humanity, are the heart of modern pop existentialism.

Other novels I like:
Vurt - Jeff Noon
Beautiful Losers - Leonard Cohen
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Gloriana - Michael Moorcock
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
Dictionary of the Khazars - Milorad Pavic

Film
-----
I used to be snooty about film but I find that my tastes have broadened inexplicably the last few years. Here are some films that come to mind:

Delicatessen, Leolo, Breakfast Club, Le Professional, Taxi Driver, The Conversation, Dog Day Afternoon, The Fisher King, Glengarry Glen Ross, Me and You and Everyone We Know, A Simple Plan, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Cyrano De Bergerac (Depardieu version), Chinatown, Electric Dreams, The Thin Blue Line, Labyrinth, Heathers, Brazil, 37°2 le matin, Johnny Stecchino, Napoleon Dynamite, Pan's Labyrinth, Groundhog Day, cool hand luke, three days of the condor. And Princess Bride! i also seem to be going through a phase where i like michael mann. Primer. The Lion in Winter (!) Papillon

Music
------
I am stuck in an 80's time warp. Also I like jazz. And classic country. (yes! I admit it! I like Patsy Cline and early Willie Nelson and Hank Williams Sr.!)

Food
-----
I am not much of a gourmand, alas. One of my favorite meals is scrambled eggs. (That's one of James Bond's favorite meals -- he likes it with champagne). I have been trying different cheeses lately. Cheese, fruit, a sliced up sausage meat of some kind. What could be tastier?

at the climbing gym.

you're looking for someone thoughtful, introspective, and with an interesting set of tastes. Do you lead an active lifestyle? That's important to me too.

I'm looking for 'whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment'.