So what makes me tick? Or go cuckoo on the hour, for that matter?

Programming

C++ is pretty much my mother tongue, and with the current project I'm working on I get the chance to stretch it in all sorts of interesting ways. GUIs, sockets, custom operators, I've done a lot and had to go digging into the help files to learn how to fake a lot more

Java is a slightly new acquisition. Wrote one giant group project of a client/server Java app using CORBA last year, covering a lot of ground from Swing through to networking.

CSS, JavaScript, and the DOM I've similarly only had about a year to get really up to speed on. But with that experience plus my trusty O'Reilly, I can get just about anything done.

Academics

People studies - call it economics, psychology, sociology, whatever you want. If it deals with how people tick, or how large groups of people make decisions, I'm on it like white on rice. Talcott Parsons, Georg Simmel, John Stuart Mill, and George Herbert Mead are some of my favorite authors in this whole "people studies" business. Not to count out David Weinberger or Donald A. Norman, who are focused around the small branch of "people-and-computer studies".

Statistics, the third kind of lie! I've got a sociology statistics and a calculus statistics book that by all rights should have vanished in some matter/antimatter reaction, but the net result is that I know where the numbers come from and how best to interpret them.

Fun

I'm not going to lie to you - the Internet is my idea of a good time. It makes for a great place to practice "people studies" because generally people aren't as inhibited. Especially interesting is the phenomenon of the virtual society, or the online game. Not that the games themselves aren't fun.