You've reached the home on the web of Richard Uhtenwoldt, born 1960. You are looking at a picture of me in 2008 outside my apartment in San Rafael, California.
My main skills are in math and science. I am what you call a scientific generalist. In recent years, my strongest scientific interest has been the works of scientists like E.T. Jaynes and Judea Pearl that constitute a comprehensive mathematical explanation of how a person can acquire valid knowledge of reality. Human psychology has been another strong interest of mine over the last couple of decades. Most of the psychological literature is worthless, even the stuff out of the Psychology Departments of the elite research universities, and a large part of acquiring scientific knowledge of the human mind is learning how to identify the 10% of the literature that is actually worth reading.
I majored in computers in college, and I wrote a lot of software which I use every day to keep notes, look things up in my address book, and read. write and search email. If you google for "Richard Uhtenwoldt", you will find hundreds of messages by me addressed to online conversations about programming languages.
OK, so here is how to contact me:
Richard Uhtenwoldt
375 Catalina Blvd, Apt 101
San Rafael, CA 94901
And here is a map showing that last address.
I am single and straight.
I have the personality traits perfectionism and introversion. "Introverted" means less outgoing, more reserved. Like many perfectionistic computer guys these days, I practice the methodology described in David Allen's book Getting Things Done.
I often write short comments on Hacker News under the username "sielskr".. I often pick the nonsense word "sielskr" when asked to pick a username.
Maybe you would like to visit the home on the web of my friend Darius Bacon.
My favorite software tools (which by the way I have used almost every day since 1992) are Emacs and the unix command-line shell. I would probably switch to Plan 9 if Plan 9 ever gets text smoothing (antialiasing) like Windows, OS X and Gnome have. (Plan 9 will probably never get text smoothing). I have long used rc as my command-line shell. (rc is the default shell on Plan 9.) My favorite software tools currently run on Arch Linux. I recently got a Mac, but I have not yet gotten used to it.
I have long had a strong desire to contribute to the bigger picture, in other words, to improve the world. I have long considered open-source software development an excellent prospective way for me to do that. I have not yet contributed any concrete programming effort to any open-source project. It would of course be easy for me to share the code I wrote for my personal use, but in my opinion, that is not a particularly effective way to improve the world. Since the goal is to be as effective as possible, I have been following the strategy of trying to understand how changes in people's software environment actually produces changes in the bigger picture in the hopes that some day I will contribute programming effort to one open-source software-development project whose expected impact on the bigger picture is vastly greater than almost all of the other projects I could have contributed to.
By saying so much so soon about computers, I might have given the impression that computers are more central to who I am than they really are. In this very public place, I am comfortable disclosing how computers figure into my life, but not comfortable disclosing most of the things more central than computers.
I play chess. I'm richardu on the Free Internet Chess Server and have played on at least one other chess site.
Finally, here are the places I have lived. I haven't put enough effort into keeping up with friends from the past, but I'm always glad to hear from them.
Since Fall 1986. San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA.
Fall 1984 to Fall 1986. Worcester, MA, USA.
January 1983 to Fall 1984. Atlanta, GA, USA.
Fall 1981 to January 1983. Boca Raton, FL, USA.
Fall 1977 to Fall 1981. Boca Raton, FL, USA. Enrolled at Florida Atlantic University. JK, MZ, Ralph C, Bob K, Jim N: I'd like to hear from you.
Fall 1975 to Fall 1977. Worcester, MA, USA. Enrolled at Burncoat Senior High.
Fall 1972 to Fall 1975. Worcester, MA, USA. Enrolled at Burncoat Junior High.