The tie is reserved for special occasions. Also, I have quite a bit less hair now. Photo by Charlie.
The tie is reserved for special occasions. Also, I have quite a bit less hair now. Photo by Charlie.
The most beautiful arrangement is a pile of things poured out at random. —Heraclitus of Ephesus, Fragment 57
My name is Chris Black. I spend my days studying plant biology at the University of Illinois. I'm a biology nerd all the time, a computer programmer in occasional bursts, and a mostly non-practicing bodger. I grew up in Wisconsin on the northern edge of the Driftless Area, went to school and climbed rocks and drank a lot of coffee in Portland, Oregon, and I am now in Urbana, Illinois trying to remember which way the rain comes from and learning to live in the flatlands.
There's not much organization here. For the most part, I compose stuff that I think the world might enjoy seeing and then I chuck it into the mess. It's all there for your viewing pleasure, if you can find it.
The older parts of the site have no organizing scheme, but you can browse newer stuff by date. Highlights include: The obligatory blog section, my undergraduate thesis, some well-considered prejudices, a link feed, assorted photos, my (outdated) résumé, a guide to HTML entities for those who aren't all that curious, an informal graphic design contest, graphics not from contests, screenshots mostly taken while debugging, the bugs I was chasing, A real-life illustration of why I distrust exclamation points, what I carry when I go backpacking, and some essays about trash recovery, the trouble with community-editable projects, and a fastidious halophile.
Me elsewhere: Twitter, Flickr, my work-focused site, and some recipes, partly mine. You can also email chris-at-bodger-dot-org, like all these spambots over here.