Tato

user since
Tue Oct 23 2001 at 17:16:14 (7.1 years ago )
last seen
Wed Nov 19 2008 at 02:09:29 (8.9 hours ago )
number of write-ups
135 - View Tato's writeups (feed)
level / experience
5 (Crafter) / 3883
C!s spent
153
mission drive within everything
shared pain decreases, shared joy increases
specialties
Boggle, Human Computer Interaction, Art History, Amateur Linguistics and Semiotics, What stuff means
school/company
Alief-Hastings High School, University of Houston, IDII, Microsoft, Lifelong Learner
motto
Uncle Owen had it coming.
most recent writeup
Scammer code

/me

Born to a deeply southern small-town model and a minor league baseball pitcher in Richmond, VA, USA. Was a mamma's boy, but not surprising since my Dad had to flee the country during my adolescence, but that's another story. I grew up in the sinus cavity that is Houston. Made good friends, had good times, got out when I could, just before the world was supposed to end. I moved to SF and fell in love with a city for the first time. Stayed there two years before grad school in Ivrea, Piemonte, Italy, where my sentence subjects slowly eroded. Expected to stay in Europe but money pressures brought me back to the states. I spent a year and a half in Seattle working for Microsoft, but am now happy to report that I am back in the Bay Area, doing cool interaction design stuff.

I like big bowls, nuance, Neil Finn, and self-reference. I like presents that are homemade and nomothetic. I write senryu on planes. I think people are interesting, good, and probably doomed in the long run. I believe in virtue and that human dreams of flight are species memories of water. I make my bed, but I also make it easy to make my bed. I know in principle I shouldn't care if I get downvoted, but I always want to know why. I think it is worthwhile to err on the side of communication rather than expression, but sometimes I slip. I sometimes lament not (having worked harder at) being famous.

I'm an autodidact, so e2 is sort of an outlet for me. It lets me convince myself that I'm not just living a life of conspicious consumption, but that can be argued.

I don't consider my being a gay nontheist vegetarian geek to be my personality, but that may be what sticks out to the uninitiated. I think I may have a toe in the tepid pools of self-actualization.

Say hi.

On the handle

I did not derive it, as some have suggested, from the tuber responsible for the historical Irish famine. I was introduced to e2 by baffo, a professor at my grad school. While registering and hunting around for a unique handle, I grabbed a children's book written in Italian I had purchased for the language practice. The cute bunny protagonist in this children's book was named Tato. It is pronounced Italian style: Tah""Toh. Not that I identified with him and his unnerving and somewhat jutifiably paranoid quest for the truth, I just liked the sound of the name. And I thought e2 was just going to be a brief thing for /me. Silly rabbit.
/me just discovered that "tato" is a recursive acronym introduced by none other than Douglas Hofstater. It stands for tato (and tato only). This makes tato (and tato only) happy.

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