I am an excellent dinner companion, not a bad lay, and excellent boyfriend material if your idea of the perfect boyfriend is the one you can bring home to meet your mother.

I'm not good at, and dislike, finding subtle ways to boast about my best attributes. Therefore, if you agree not to form the false impression that I'm an overwhelmingly arrogant prick, I will dispense with the chicanery customary to these profiles. Okay? Good. I'm glad we had this little talk.

Your first impression upon meeting me will be that I have a strange accent and a bad hairstyle. I'm moderately good-looking, but nothing to write home about. I compensate for this by being interesting and occasionally funny to talk to. I'm especially interested in politics, technology, and science, but I'm pretty broadly interested in most fields and will certainly have an opinion about a topic, even if it's not a well-informed one (it will likely have been lifted wholesale from the previous week's Economist).

I make jokes a lot, usually based on cynicism and/or bad puns. Eddie Izzard is one of my favourite comedians. In spite of my cynicism I am a romantic to the core, somewhat to my own surprise. Socially, I used to do this by dancing a lot at indie clubs on weekends, but that has dried up since moving to SF from London, so I'm trying to get back into it. If you think you know a good club, then I'm always up for trying one out. In the meantime, I battle off the endless tsunami of calories that is the American lifestyle with cycling, sporadic gym attendance, and the lack of a car, which means a lot of incidental walking everywhere.

I have a bunch of hobbies, nearly all of which involve sitting in front of a computer and hence are indistinguishable. Activities I enjoy that do not involve sitting on my ass in front of a computer include hiking, riding to random locations, fine dining, and recently Rock Band 2, which narrowly escapes the "on my ass in front of a computer" category as you can play it standing up.

I hate travelling: planes are cramped and boring and expensive. However, I love Being Other Places. So far my strategy for overcoming this situation has been to move to far-away places for extended periods, then travel mostly locally around there. I am still in the process of exploring California; it's big and pretty and varied.

One of my favourite types of conversation is one where you start with a ridiculous premise ("Monkeys should run congress!"), and then everyone at the table runs with it ("they'd be less swayed by lobbyists", "...unless the lobbyists had bananas", "South American banana-exporting nations would become the new Middle East", etc). Do you find yourself having these sorts of conversations? Then you are probably the sort of person I'd like to talk to.

As far as dating goes, I'm looking for someone who will challenge me and stimulate me, both mentally and lifestyle-wise. I want to have good-natured arguments about things, and try new things I wouldn't have tried. I have a tendency to walk all over people, so you'll either be the kind of person who doesn't mind me doing that (most boyfriends so far) or somebody who doesn't put up with that shit and stands his own ground (theoretical perfect boyfriend).

I'm an INTJ should you consider this relevant.

I woke up one morning a week or two ago and discovered that despite not having matured emotionally since about age 16, I am now 28, an age I once regarded as 3 years older than Dead. I'm still processing the realization that even the most charitable observer would describe me as a man rather than a boy now. Adulthood has snuck up on me.

I grew up on the tiny island of Trinidad in the Caribbean, moved to the UK at age 18, worked in the dot-com boom for a bit, went to university, and stayed in the UK for 8 years. Then I got a job that moved me to San Francisco, where I work for a Very Large Internet Company (not the cool one).

Long-term I will probably roll the dice at a few startups, and either get rich or burn out. I'll probably stay in the Bay area; California is pretty great.

I also created a community site called GayGeeks.org. People with high match percentages to me are disproportionately members of this site. You might want to try it.

choosing the right words, either for maximum accuracy or greatest impact.

I'm a prolific reader but generally not of the kind of books read by people who consider themselves "well-read". So, no Proust or Kerouac or that Russian bloke whose name I forget.

I'm a big fan of science fiction, which I read lots and lots of, but almost nothing else. I have a lot of time for Neal Stephenson (Diamond Age ftw), Stephen F. Hamilton, David Brin, Iain M. Banks, and a soft spot for Isaac Asimov. I also love Terry Pratchett, whose Discworld books are my staple when I want something not too challenging; I re-read them endlessly.

Movie-wise I'm a bit of a philistine; I don't really seek out movies that are challenging or gritty. So I love shiny fun stuff: sci-fi stuff like Hackers, the Matrix and all the Marvel movies; also musicals like Hairspray, Moulin Rouge and Camp. I count some all-time favourites like Romeo+Juliet and Gattaca amongst my "respectable" movies, and I'm also not averse to seeing "good" movies -- I just don't seek them out.

Do you really care about my favourite food? Does it tell you anything about my personality?

web development. Sad but true.

wanting to go dancing. But in SF, there are so few decent indie dance clubs, or even pop dance clubs. There are just lots of annoyingly tiny overcrowded bars.

I have a thing for skinny guys and/or blue hair.

you got to the end of this profile. You've already invested, like, 3 whole minutes! You need some kind of payoff.