Hello, my name is Zachary Weinberg. I go by “Zack,” except on paper. Pleased to meet you.

I’m about thirty-five years old, and I grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles, California. I’m presently a researcher of Internet security at Carnegie Mellon University, Silicon Valley. Before that I worked for the Mozilla Corporation, and before that I studied how people understand language at UC San Diego.

My interests range all over the sciences and a little way into philosophy, plus some of the arts (notably, candle-making, pottery, and game design). This website is intended to capture all of the ideas that to date haven’t made it out of the back of my mind, so will be wide-ranging as well.

Everything dated prior to August 2009 on this site was originally posted on my LiveJournal. I don’t plan to continue doing this—new stuff will appear either here or there, not both.

Colophon

Site design was done by me, with a great deal of help from Pam Griffith, whose design-fu is far superior. Body text is set in Quattrocento Sans, headings in Cardo (subset), and monospace (e.g. code samples) in Inconsolata. The face in the top banner was constructed by me using Mr. Picassohead. The owl which may or may not be visible at the very bottom of each page, depending on your browser and screen size, was originally a pen-and-ink drawing of two owls on a branch by Alanna Risse.

The CMS is WordPress. I don’t actually like WordPress, but it is less trouble than anything else so far, and the things I dislike about it have more to do with me than with it. The theme started out as Roots but only a few remnants of the original structure remain. It is highly specialized for this site, probably not of interest to anyone else, and will receive no further development; the next major change will be to switch to a static site compiler, probably the first one I notice has gained production-grade support for locally hosted comments. It doesn’t look terrible in old versions of Internet Explorer thanks to the HTML5 Shiv and Respond.js.

Hosting is at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, which I do recommend, but if this site appears to load faster than others, it’s probably more because of HyperCache Extended and Steve Souders’ advice.

I write all my posts in Markdown, because HTML is far too verbose to put up with while composing, but WYSIWYG ceased to be my friend in the days of Microsoft Word 4.0.