About me
I live with my beatiful wife, Melissa (she's a high-energy/astro physicist, as well) and our daughters Emma Rose and Julia Donata. In addition, we share the house with our (female) cat Luna. No doubt I am outnumbered—gender wise.
I am a passionate supporter of the free software movement. As such, I consider companies like Microsoft, Apple and Amazon threats to everybody's freedom. (And google has become pretty bad, too, over the years.) If this all comes to you as shocking or surprising (or even just unfamiliar) I suggest you peek at the Free Software Foundation website and the Richard Stallman's personal site.
Bizarre as it might seem, I have a passion for digital typography and, particularly, for the TeX and LaTeX typesetting systems. I proudly own an account for 0x$2.00 (two hexadecimal dollars) at Donald Knuth's Bank of San Serriffe.
I have played guitar and/or bass in a number of bands over the years, although, admittedly, I don't have much time for that, these days. (I doubt anyone will notice, either way.) Soul Pirate is the name of the last (reggae) band I played with, and they tell me they still have a facebook page, out there; you can check out our last (and only) EP Vibration!
Finally, I am an amateur liuthier (well, that might be too much, but in any event I like playing with wood and make things out of it that produce sounds). The image on the right portraits the pulsar guitar that I made as a gift to the former Fermi analysis coordinator Matthew Kerr.