(This is largely just a copy-and-paste from my old Google Profile for the time being.)
I'm a childfree computer geek living in Harriman, NY.
I'm quite introverted, but I don't shut up once you get me talking about a subject that interests me. I loathe political process in any form (e.g., elections, community moderation), and will quickly slip away from any venue or group where the vile practice surfaces. I turn into pliable mush in the presence of cats — something my own cats understand very well and ruthlessly exploit. I dislike human children and can't stand parents who have lost the ability to talk about anything else. I'm a thorough materialist and atheist, but discussions about atheism bore me to tears — it's a settled subject and holds no further interest for me. I intend to live long enough, in some incarnation or another, to see either heat death or the Big Crunch. I'm a grammar snoot, which leaves me wincing several times a day at others' poor writing.
I'm something of a libertarian, but of the consequentialist sort; I think the sacred deontological-libertarian cow of "natural rights" is, as Jeremy Bentham put it, "nonsense on stilts" (i.e., fantasy bullshit). I can easily enrage conservatives by discussing my extremely open-minded views on sexuality and the usefulness of abortion, and enrage liberals by discussing the implications of heritable psychological traits and my scorn for environmentalism.
I'm a Python and Django programmer, competent with Javascript, a fair hand with Emacs Lisp, and know how to read Haskell without my brain melting. I spend most of my day in various Zsh shells, Emacs, and Safari; I'd spend it all in Emacs alone if I could. I weirdly dislike large displays and multiple visible windows, finding myself quite comfortable flipping rapidly between several full-screened applications via keyboard shortcuts. I adore Git and hate using any other VCS (and not for lack of experience). Having dithered between the worlds of Apple and a more open-source stack (Arch Linux and Android), I'm currently back in the former camp, using OS X and iOS.
I spend a good part of my day listening to electronic music, particularly from the genres of futurepop and synthpop. Among my favorite artists are And One, Assemblage 23, Ayria, Back And To The Left, Beborn Beton, Blaqk Audio, Boole, Code 64, Cosmicity, Covenant, Depeche Mode, Frozen Plasma, Imperative Reaction, Iris, Mind In A Box, Necessary Response, Neuroactive, Neuroticfish, Rotersand, Seabound, Stromkern, System Syn, Virtual Descent, VNV Nation, and Wolfsheim.
My other interests include anime, board games, cognitive science, Dance Dance Revolution, firearms (guns), hard science fiction, philosophy, psychology, and transhumanism.
I have three cats who I adore as my "furry children", although only one lives with me. I'm lucky to have an amazing girlfriend as my partner, even if she does call my cat "Cat". ^_^
If you want to contact me, my email is tomxtobin@tomxtobin.com; I'm not on Facebook, so don't bother looking.