About

About me

I am a regular bloke but a philomath. I work for a large IT corporation and I love my job which — judging by the fact that people usually complain about their jobs — seems to make me a lucky person. I am married with a wonderful woman who is my best friend and we have two cats, both rescued when they were kittens and I love all of them a lot. I love kids and animals, in general I love everything and everyone that is candid and not prejudiced. I am not an ambitious person. Although I have a PhD, a good professional record, corporate position etc, I will always prefer living a quiet and relaxed life than chasing wild horses. I believe life is short, thus it makes no sense to spend precious time worrying for petty things. I like to send hand–written postcard and call my friends on holidays and birthdays. I would like to have more friends, but I am happy with the ones I have, because they are all great humans and I enjoy spending my time with them. I like beer and barbecues and Marvel characters and movies. I bought the entire Tintin collection, but also bought a great Agilent scope. I have many hobbies and interests that probably I will never master, but the great thing is that I am always learning something new. I love Apple products, but I also love reading paper books and sticking my nose between pages, sniffing the smell of print on paper, on a fresh book. I love butter cookies and turkish food, but enjoy a lot pizzas and gyros. I love to cook. I love life in general and everything which is technology, fun, friendship and beauty.

What is this

This site is a reflection of my love for learning. It started as a repository of information I gathered during my final phases of my PhD; as I wanted to document my PhD work and I expand it with bits of information that I got from various sources of interest, mostly books and websites I found a blog to be very useful. There is no exact focus or orientation of the content, although I wanted to have it very organized and use it for future projects.  Although I went for my PhD Thesis Defense in December 2011 I still have to do some finishing touches to this repository so I will get back here and update the enclosed information, links and (maybe) the design.

Then I started to write about electronics and programming. And I expanded with things I do around, like fridge magnets or paper lampions, or kites. And that’s it. Below you will find some more words, from the original About page I wrote several years ago.

Currently this site became more of a mirror that reflects my current interests and things I do in my free time. Hope you will find it at least funny and not too serious. It might open some doors towards some challenges. You’ll be the only one to decide.

page separatorThe project lifespan covered a period staring mid ’99 and september 2010. The result is a pile of books, articles, papers and other stuff I eagerly transversed through, some more insight and experience I gathered, the fact that I really started to love math (although sometimes is much more of a love-and-hate relationship since my background is medical not math) and an iPhone/ iPod Touch app I designed, coded and tested under Cocoa Touch with Apple iOS SDK as a support of the concept I tried to defend in my PhD.

This is a concept of an end-to-end simple mobile-enabled workflow that allows sending remote real-time field info used by a naïve classifier to classify and predict probability of survival of car-induced trauma patients. ER physicians will get decisional support in order to assist them in the decision-making process of case triage. This is not a disaster-management-like app, much more of a peace-time stuff ’cause it requires permanent data connection via GSM and/ or WiFi, prerequisites which are considered absent or not fulfilled (or “nil” ?) during a disaster sit. In such situations low-tech rules.

“Work” in menu above directs to the collection of posts with various topics, mostly Cocoa development code snippets, versions and parts of tutorials found on different web pages. I have extensively used tags and categories provided by underlying WordPress platform to organize this repository and have cross-references to different concepts. Moreover, I built a simple plugin that allows integration of BibTex data with WordPress database and some reviews for some books that I consider truly outstanding.

Don’t expect to find here tutorials or extensive coverage of “how-to” topics. This site is more similar to a researcher notepad filled with sketches, thoughts, ideas, blueprint parts, gibberish, failures and successes. However, despite its obvious lack in focus and orientation, it has structure and you might find it useful sometimes. I did not intend it to be a textbook, rather a programming diary.

Enjoy.