Matt's blog

Like all gentry-class young professionals and grad students, I always get asked what I do. You know, for a living. For the past two years I've been an astrophysics grad student by day and web development shop owner by night, or vice versa, depending on my schedule. When I told people outside of school that I was pretty seriously considering leaving my Ph.D program, they would ask me why I'd give up something as "awesome" as astronomy. When I told people at school that I used to make six figures as a web developer in New York and left to go to grad school, they asked me why I'd ever leave it for this life.

So, I figured it's time to write a blog post explaining why I've done all the things I've done. Maybe I'll get some business cards with the URL to it printed up and hand them out at parties when people ask me these things. So, here is the answer to all your questions about my life decisions.

When I was a teenager, I was an extremely diehard supporter of what was then called Apple Computer, Inc. It's a little embarrassing to think about now, because as an adult I'm pretty opposed to the idea of anyone's identity being that closely tied to a company that they patronize or work for. Nonetheless, at the time the association made sense to me. In that era, Apple was not the corporate behemoth they are now. They were a fledgling company whose only products were computers and software for those computers.

I spend a lot of time at Coffee Commissary. It contains predominantly morose-looking screenwriter aspirants typing away furiously in Final Draft. Occasionally there's someone with a graduate school psychology textbook and a highlighter. Pretty often though, some people are on a weirdly revelatory first (or second, or third) date, right in earshot of me.

I wish that I were one of those people who could write both well and often, but I am not, due to the mutually exacerbating facts of my busy schedule and extreme tendency to procrastinate. I feel that anyone who reads this blog probably knows me in some other context and is aware of what I've been up to since I stopped updating this regularly, but in any event, here are some tidbits, roughly in chronological order.

Over Memorial Day weekend, I took a road trip up to Montreal. Much like New York, Montreal interests me both as a place and as a concept. I started learning French in school when I was in 3rd grade, although I've never actually lived in a French speaking place, so every visit to Montreal always reminds me both of how much I'd like to be really good at French language, and also how far away from that I am relative to native French speakers. Still, I've always had a good time there. It's an interesting mix of old and new, French and English, Europe and America. I've often idly fantasized about living in Paris or Rome, but I honestly find the immense and long history of those place distracting to the idea of imagining a quotidian life in them. Montreal, on the other hand, is about as recent as most of the northeast U.S. but has this distinctly European vibe because it's French-speaking.

Back in January, a Drupal module called User Queue that I wrote and contributed to drupal.org got flagged as having a security vulnerability. To be clear, although User Queue is sort of useful (it's in production on both Observer.com and The Big Money), it's not exactly a huge or mission critical component for any site that I'm aware of. In fact, it only really exists because the much more feature-rich Nodequeue doesn't handle users due to their being a different type of first-class object in Drupal.

This time of year, the people at Fox News predictably start chattering about the by-now infamous war on Christmas. Accordingly, the people over at Daily Kos and other liberal motherships (like MSNBC, these days) start shooting back. A recent Rasmussen poll found that a majority of Americans would rather see "Merry Christmas" on ads and such. Republicans vastly preferred it, while Democrats were more tepid. I will break with my liberal brethren here and say that I actually prefer "Merry Christmas" to "Happy Holidays"... and I don't even celebrate Christmas.

I'm part of perhaps the first generation of people who grew up with commercially-produced computer games alongside their physical, real-world toys. I've been playing some kind of computer game (or console video game) off and on my entire life. When you break it down, all computer and video games have something in common. You face some task or challenge, you complete it, you receive points, cash, gold pieces, experience, skills, or some kind of reward. Those perhaps help you accomplish the next task. Eventually you exhaust all the tasks and have beaten the game (or maybe the game goes on forever depending how linear the narrative is).

Recently, I've been thinking about how cars are portrayed versus other forms of transportation in movies, TV shows, even commercials. In fact, what really prompted this was the following Audi commercial, which was picked up by a number of transportation and urban planning blogs. Observe.

Tomorrow is the primary election for New York City offices: mayor, city council, comptroller, public advocate, district attorney and probably a few other offices. The city is completely ignored in national elections; in fact, it is kicked to the curb by a lot of rural politicians, but I won't get into that.

The general election is in November, as per convention. However with the exception of the mayoral race, there is no realistic chance of Republicans or Independents winning anything except on Staten Island -- the current composition of the 51-seat council is 48 Dems, 5 others (3 GOP, 1 Working Families, 1 independent). Thus, the Democratic primary is effectively the real election for most of the offices.

Even though term limits for city councillors have been extended by an extra term, there are a lot of open and fairly contentious council seats, in addition to the citywide offices. Since I know you're dying to know, here is who I'm voting for and why.