To understand some of my statements, basic familiarity with my background might be helpful:

• I am a 30-something old (I'd be more precise, but that would require annual updates to this page)
• I live in Seattle, WA, but a lot of these pages were written while I was living in Nashua, NH.
• I grew up primarily in Russia, and soon after I got out of college, I moved to the U.S. That makes me largely bi-cultural, as in, for example, I can talk about the inherent superiority of either metric or imperial, or about the inherent dumbness of either soccer compared to baseball or baseball compared to soccer.
• The girl named Sophia I mention once in a while is my daughter.
• I make my living as a software engineer/computer programmer.
• I am not quite sure why I write so much about skiing.