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Philip (flip) Kromer's Homepage

Real Life

Mission

I'm building tools to help organize, explore and visualize the massive streams of raw information about our universe that are becoming available. I've always been interested in computers, education, physics and design, and I couldn't be more excited to be working on something which calls on all of them so satisfyingly.

While I make up my mind where I'm concentrating, you may find my work at


Business Flip

I'm at the end stage of my grad degree and so I'm not really looking for work right now. Once I am, I'd like to find an interesting opportunity that will let me continue what I've been doing and share it in a largely open fashion. (I got started on the vizsage/infochimp project by considering what free and open tools are available to help schoolchildren explore datasets. The answer: some here, some there, but mostly, sadly, none that are generically simple and useful.)

Nonetheless, here's the portfolio I created for the education portion of my degree, and here's a several-year-old copy of my Résumé (html, pdf, doc, txt) and my vitae.
 

Me

I have a work blog where I post esoteric geeky crap that comes to mind. I also have the twitter/tumblr, am on the facebooks and have a personal blog -- I bet you can figure out where those are if you care.
(Prepending an article to an anarthrous and recent term is good clean irony. "I feel silly that I use this but here ya go".)
 

Photos

Please enjoy my Flickr page. The Washington Post used some photos of mine in an article by my mother. So did this interesting Austin guidebook. Some old snapshots: Me - My Family - All.
 

Books

Please enjoy my Library Thing page. I also have a couple-years-old screenscrape of all my Amazon.com ratings. (Is there a good generic tool that lets me reclaim my metadata?)


Resources

Reference sheets

Here are some pretty reference cards I made:

Quickie DNS

A little iPhone-optimized GeoIP-enabled DNS/reverse DNS/whois interface I whipped up.

Camping List A comprehensive, well-tested checklist for backcountry camping and backpacking.
Austin Sights The places I enjoy most Austin
Least Squares Excel routines to do least squares fitting with the error in two variables
Teaching resources Lesson plans and explorations
Scribbles

Various crap I've written up for one reason or another.

Econ Fiddlings Economic data exploring the typical historic rates of inflation and stock index returns.
More... ...stuff someone may actually find useful.

Projects

Me Big Dork I've orchestrated some good April Fools Stunts. At the 2007 O Henry Pun-Off I engaged in an epic 15+ minute long battle of twits with the estimable Joe Sabia. I won the local Edible Book Festival with my tasteful, restrained entry "A Havarti-breaking work of Saga and Cheeses". The nerdiest thing I've ever done, though, was to skip school to take the train up to NYC and watch Kasparov play Karpov.
Tri Stuff

I did the 100-mile Ride for the Roses three times, in memory of my friend Emery Kalinov and in honor of family friend and cancer survivor Elaine Levine. Money raised from the ride (donation info) goes to help cancer survivors and to support cancer research.

I've also completed a number of triathlons, including a half-ironman in October 2006 (one and a half years after my back surgery: thanks Sportcenter and Dr. McAfee). Thanks also to UT's Texas Triathletes club who made getting started fun and easy.

Old Cars

I have a 1968 Buick Wildcat convertible which is a blast to own and drive. Just about every time I fill up in East Austin someone offers to buy it. (Really: it happens more than 3/4 of the time).

I have been building a hotrod from a 1939 Tudor Sedan DeLuxe. For many, many years.

HEV I was on a team that designed and constructed, from the ground up, an energy-efficient passenger car.
Lock In I wrote a software digital Lock In Amplifier in LabView. A lock-in amplifier lets you extract extremely small signals, even in the presence of noise or interference.
Phoenix An animation that my friend Juliet and I made for the award-winning graphics course at Cornell (8MB MPEG).
DNA What is the shortest DNA sequence containing all 8-character palindromes (allowing overlap)? (.nb file)
Gadgets Once in a while I put together a crazy mechanical thing.
Design Some T Shirts & other artwork I have designed.
April Fools Jokes April Fool's Day hoaxes I've perpetrated.

Interests

 
Stuff, Rated Ratings for most of the books and some of the music I've bought the last few years.
Music Ska, Swing, and Surf; Punk, Rock, Rockabilly, 80's; Go-go, Rap, Afrobeat.
Hot Rods Vroom!
Science Mad and otherwise.
Design Especially typography and Information design.
Woodworking I enjoy woodworking with hand tools -- it's quieter.

Other

etc.

A rapper also named mrflip.

 

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You may notice that many of these elements have no links.
That is because they have no content yet to link to.
This will not be the first content-free home page (CFWWWHP)
to announce that it is

"Per m a n en tl y u n d e r con struc t i on "

My Political Compass reads (-5.0, -5.6): I am proudly in the center of the Libertarian Left