Home page
If you're looking for a tech geek from Cambridge named Ed, then you've probably come to the right place. Welcome to my home on the internet... Fresh news is contained in the blog section, by the way — this page is more of a long-term summary.
MIT activities
Until recently I was a graduate student at the excellent Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I studied numerical cosmology under Edmund Bertschinger and later switched to astrophysical plasma physics under Bruno Coppi. Unfortunately I did not fully complete my Ph.D. thesis under either of them, so I'm left with a nice education but no piece of paper telling me so...
I'm still trying to stay involved around campus, since I do consider MIT virtually a second home, and there's lots of interesting things to do for someone who actually likes attending lectures. Extracurricularly, I am an officer in the MIT Science Fiction Society and to a lesser extent the MIT Anime Club. I still also try to maintain a connection with the wearable computing group at the Media Lab (and its recent spin-off startup AWare Technologies), since I've been a wearables groupie and sometimes a research participant for quite a while. More recently I've started hanging out at the MIT Entrepreneur's Club and associated (gasp!) business events to get a handle on Boston's technology startup landscape.
Hobbies
A few years back, I started writing shareware for the Palm OS under the company name DaggerWare. It was moderately successful, and if you used a Palm during that time period, you probably at least heard of HackMaster, which was my best-known piece of software. Unfortunately, I let the business slide away to concentrate more on my studies, which in retrospect was probably not the brightest of moves, all things considered. I'm still peripherally involved in the Palm and PDA scene, currently using a Treo 650 as my second, more reliable brain and attending the meetings of the Boston PDA User's Group. I may get back into development as well, if I can identify a decent unwritten niche program.
Another constellation of hobbies surrounds my interest in anime and related Japanese pop culture. Although my language skills aren't anywhere close to being native, I did try my hand at a translation or two under the Chibi no Choco fansub group name, and I also help to distribute releases for No Name Losers and the now-defunct Choco Fansubs, among others.
More recently I was the cofounder of the group insani, which has been quite successful in adapting several Japanese visual-novel games for the English reader, the most well-received of which were planetarian and Narcissu. My function in the group has been primarily technical, handling the reverse engineering of game data formats and doing some graphical edits — the actual adaptations have been mostly the doing of the insane translator gp32, though I'm also getting my feet wet with simpler game translations.
Although I haven't authored anything new in a while, I used to write a fair bit of (possibly mediocre) fantasy and science fiction, which is kept under the separate fiction writing heading.
Pictures
My appearance won't win any prizes, but if you want to be able to recognize me on sight at a conference or something, I look more or less like this according to my Treo's camera. If reality is too harrowing, you can instead try to learn to recognize me in mediated form:
If you need to get in touch with me, all my info is of course on the contact page. See ya around...