Who?
I'm a student living in Chico, California. I am studying at CSU Chico and plan to double major in Computer Science and Biomedical Informatics. Computer science, and the related art of computer programming, are topics that I find very interesting. I'm also very interested in linguistics, including computational linguistics. Career-wise, I'd like to get into medical or biological informatics in an academic setting.
Programming is also a skill of considerable practical benefit. (If you don't already know a programming language, I suggest you investigate the Python Programming Language, which is my language of choice for most applications.) Most code I've written that I think would be generally useful can be found in the Programming section of this site.
I believe in one God, not three, that a loving God would not torture anyone forever, and that while He is directly responsible for the existance of Earth and its life forms, God did not magic the Earth out of the void in six days a few thousand years ago. I have been an ovo-lacto vegetarian for several years for aesthetic and ethical reasons. With respect to the philosophy of science, I feel that scientific theories are tools for making predictions, and should be judged mainly by their utility in that capacity, but that in practice, many of our theories are probably actually correct. I think that it is inadvisable to treat information as a commodity, in general. Finally, I respect your right to disagree openly with any of the above.
I enjoy caving (the exploration of wild caves) and hiking. The summer of 2008, I worked at Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation, doing general applications program development. In 2009, I did an internship in bioinformatics at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
Although I'm not very good at it, I do enjoy occasional writing. Most of my `literary' output can be found under the Writing section of this site. It includes my MSV Starfire series, a group of science-fiction short stories about the crew of the eponymous salvage vessel MSV Starfire and the universe that hates them. My humor writings - mostly related to role-playing games - are also there.
I use Gentoo and Ubuntu Linux. I have been using a GNU/Linux system of one type or another for a several years now as my primary computer, although I also have an Apple Macintosh. (Only very serious circumstances could compel me to give any money to Microsoft, the Evil Empire, and I generally avoid using its products if I can help it.)
This web page used to be strictly black text on a white background, but I finally gave up on its minimalist aesthetic and made it a bit fancier. Still, I hope that you will find it functional and quick-loading. The navigation bar to the left organizes the information here into hopefully-useful categories. It is graciously hosted by ferazelhosting.net, also based in California. It was written entirely in gvim, an enhanced graphical version of the (in?)famous VI editor.
My family name can also be spelled Schröder. It is of German origin, and the two dots above the letter 'o' are the diacritical mark for umlaut, which can be replaced with a following 'e' as it is in Schroeder if you don't want to bother with typing the diacritic on a non-German keyboard. My name is not, however, Schroder. Please, try to be accurate with diacritical marks in general, not just for Schroeders, but for everyone with diacritics in their name and especially for people who live in Düsseldorf.
Enjoy your visit.