About the name
My domain name, 96dB, refers to the dynamic range of a standard audio CD. I own about 1500 of them (CDs, that is), and I've worked my whole career in the audio industry (my current employer rhymes with "nose"). I like the domain name because it has only four characters and when it is written lowercase it almost makes a visual palindrome.
About the booklog/weblog
Since the start of 1995, I've kept a list of every book I have read, and I have made an effort to record my reactions to each book. I started publishing these notes on the web (my web site was hosted at the MIT Media Lab and called A Reader's Journal). I didn't know until late 2002 that what I'd been doing for almost eight years was weblogging.
I very rarely change my initial comments, so what you see here are my first reactions to each book, not necessarily my current opinions. These are just my opinions, so try not to be offended by them (even it it's your book I don't like).
If you find my comments are useful to you, or you think you know of a book that I'd like, feed free to write me an email, but don't take it personally if I don't read something you recommend—I already have more unread books than I can handle.
About the geek
In case you don't know me already, I am, among other things:
- a fanatic music buff (indie and hard rock, groove-based jazz, jazz inspired by '65-'75 Miles Davis)
- an avid reader of literary fiction, non-space-opera science fiction, and more
- a husband and a father of two
- the lead guitarist of the all-dad hard-rock cover band Paternüll (pronounced "paternal")
- an okay photographer
- a research scientist/software engineer for a consumer audio company
- allergic to the geriatric diabetic cat we've had since 1995
I have a lot of obsessive/compulsive tendencies, but luckily I'm also kind of lazy, so I manage to lead a fairly balanced life.
I used to be a graduate student at M.I.T. in the EECS program (in digital signal processing at first, but I later switched to biomedical engineering). I completed my Ph.D at The Media Lab, as a member of the Machine Listening Group (now known as the Music, Mind and Machine group). There, I built the first computer system that could identify solo musical instruments from recordings about as well as people can (you can read about it at my old research homepage). Before that, I did some work on automatic music transcription, some modeling of human spatial hearing, and I (with a colleague) created a somewhat famous data set for 3D sound. If you really care about that stuff, here's a list of my publications, most of which are available as PDFs for download.
Now that my life requires gainful employment, I work doing applied research for a major consumer audio company. I lead a small team that specializes in rapid prototyping next-generation intelligent music systems, and I'm personally responsible for developing the AI algorithms that make the systems smart. The job pays the bills nicely, and it is very exciting to see my work making a big difference in how people enjoy music. And the good stuff isn't even out yet!
(If you're a kick-ass programmer who knows a little bit about everything, and you want to work in the greater Boston area, drop me a note.)
Colophon
The original Reader's Journal was a perl CGI script that combined a flat-text database file with hand-written HTML into a suite of web pages. In 2002, I moved the book data to an XML format and wrote some Python scripts to create the site as a bundle of flat web pages (the HTML was a mash up of Frontpage [ick!] and hand-coding).
Today, this site runs on Python, Django, and Markdown, and the book data lives in a SQLite database. Nearly all of the pages are generated on the fly, and the templates are hand-coded (validating!) strict XHTML and CSS.
I write software in Python whenever I can, and have done so consistently since about 2000. In my more than 25 years of coding, I have never found another language that comes anywhere close to Python in letting me try out my ideas "at the speed of thought".
Recent entries