I am a writer and photographer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with my wife Kelly and twin sons, Jack and Peter. My short stories have appeared online at Small Spiral Notebook, Failbetter, and the Summerset Review, among other places, and in print in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Ballyhoo Stories, Going Down Swinging, and Duck & Herring. A current list of my publications can be found here.

If you’re a potential employer (hello, potential employer!) who landed here thanks to a Google search or suchlike, expecting to find a J2EE developer, worry not: you’ve found the right place. My resume is here. Incidentally, the top Google hits are all germane to this site, except the one from the Notre Dame theater department (I went to a different Midwestern Catholic college) and biography of Pablo Picasso.

My photography is in part an exploration of vintage cameras and techniques; I enjoy working with the quirks and frustrations of a variety of cameras, ranging from box cameras of the 1940s to classic SLRs of the 1970s. My current kit is described here. Various galleries are here. And more or less every day I post a new picture here.

This site is currently powered by WordPress, and replaces a previous site that was built on my own mix of Java servlets and JSPs and Axis web services. That site apparently generated one problem too many for my host (an external RSS feed’s URL changed, and I failed to trap for that exception), so I’ve decided to go with a tool that someone else built. I’ve based my theme on Patricia Muller’s Connections Eric Setiawan’s Nigiri Sushi (I’ve stripped it down a bit and added support for Lokesh Dakur’s Lightbox 1.0); I’m still fiddling with it, this PHP thing being so new to me.

I’m also playing around with some interesting plugins and other widgets, including:

• Matt Mullenweg’s Akismet for killing comment spam (461 caught and counting!)
• Matt Kingston’s Weighted Categories Francesco Mapelli’s Category Cloud plugin¹ for the nifty tag cloud below (which may be evidence of the new mullet in tasteless ubiquity; sigh)
• Matt Mullenweg’s Hello Dolly, which I’ve hacked to display random lines from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot on my admin pages (for my pleasure only…)
• Matt Read’s Custom Query String plugin to keep one post on the front page and lots of ‘em on the category pages. (Is there a rule that WordPress plugin authors all need to be named “Matt”?)
• The LibraryThing Author tag cloud (can one wear two mullets?)
• StatCounter for inbound link and traffic tracking (there’s not enough of it…)
• MyBlogLog for outbound link tracking

Geeky stuff, no?

If you have a comment on something I’ve written, or an interest in one of my pictures, drop me a line or leave a comment on this site. I’d love to hear what you have to say!

Some Rights Reserved

Pictures

Words

My photographs are covered under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. You are welcome to copy, distribute, and transmit my photographs, and build upon the work in your own creative efforts, with the following restrictions: You must attribute the work to me (a mention of my name as the original photographer, or a link back to this site, is sufficient) You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.

The words on this site, including short stories that may be published in the Stories section and book reviews published in the Till human voices wake us section, unless clearly attributed to another author and utilized under traditional copyright fair use or an applicable Creative Commons license, are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. You may copy, distribute, and transmit my words, but you may not change them or build upon them without permission. This license applies only to pieces published on this site; stories published elsewhere, in print or electronically, are covered under traditional copyright, or by the agreements made between myself and the publisher at the time of publication. This means: You must attribute the work to me (a mention of my name as the original author, or a link back to this site, is sufficient) You may not use this work for commercial purposes. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

As always, if you have any questions, just ask!

1. WordPress 2.1.2 broke “Weighted Categories”; grazie, Francesco, for extending the “mullet” to the next version of WordPress! [Hide the verbosity]

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