meson.orgMark E. Shoulson

Home About Me About this Site Languages Mathematics Writing Systems Calendars Crafts Religion Blog Contact Me Last modified: 07-Nov-2013 Atom feed for this site My site, and welcome to it Well, after literally years of neglecting it, I finally decided to make constructing a decent website for myself a priority. Maybe this is good enough, maybe it isn't, but it's well past time for me to do something , ready or not. I'm trying to organize things with the menu to the left, but if you've ever met me, you'll know that I have way too many interests to be conveniently catalogued. Anyway, for the forseeable future (and possibly longer, if I don't manage to break my usual habits), many of the pages on this site will be less than complete or unavailable (and many others that should be here won't even be listed). Bear with me. If I do keep up with this site, you can keep up with it too, by subscribing to my Atom feed , which I hope to keep up to date as well. Yes, all maintained by hand, the old-fashioned way! I bring you only the finest hand-tooled data made with imported all-natural electrons. I have decided that in the “menu” pages of part of the site I'm going to talk about and say things I know about the topic at hand, even though there are better sites and people who know more than I do. I'll try to provide links to some of those, too. Frequently Sought Pages Calendar Conversion Applet Handmade Topological Shapes 4D-Rotation Applet About Me The Important Thing to Remember When Reading this Site The thing to remember is: What happens is that every so often get these obsessions: I get absolutely fascinated and consumed by some subject for a period of days or weeks. Usually the obsession abates by then, but in the meantime I've picked up a whole lot of knowledge about whatever obscure weird thing seized me. Which is why you'll find little bits and pieces of everything scattered around this site. So it would seem I'm into a little bit of everything, and still somehow manage to feel like I don't accomplish anything. Some of my interests (hopefully many of them by the time you read this) are on this site and in thus in the menu to the left, but they probably don't cover it, no matter how long I've been working on this site. For a slightly bizarre tour of the world, try Googling for my name and wander through the links. Don't stop at the first page, though: keep looking through. I'm a computer scientist by training, majoring in that subject in college and acquiring a Master's degree in it afterwards. Then I went to work at Bellcore , now Telcordia. After a few years there I bounced to NEC Research Labs , doing system administration. Thence I went to Salomon Brothers , where I worked in data security. A year of that almost killed me, and I went to work at The College of New Jersey , teaching introductory computer science. I really enjoyed that, and realized that what I really needed was to go back to academia and try for a Ph.D., which I always wanted (and still do). So I went to Rutgers to try that out. And it was great, I took some great classes and taught more courses (I like teaching). But I guess it's my ADHD or something; I just can't keep my focus together long enough to write a thesis, so I've sort of dropped out of that. Someday, someday, I still hope to return and get that elusive diploma. (In the meantime, I've probably done at least as much work as a doctorate takes “on the side” in my many hobbies). So after that I went and taught for a few years at Yeshivas Bais Tzvi Yaakov , a strange place indeed. It's a yeshiva (one of two, in fact) on the thirteenth floor(!) of a telecommunications building, specifically the main office of IDT Corp. . And what would I teach at a yeshiva? Why, computers, of course! I taught a class in Linux system administration, and programming classes in Perl and Java. Currently I work full-time at Choice Logistics , despite the fact that this very web page said I wasn't working full-time for over a year and a half after I started working there. Other Mark Shoulsons Usually somewhere around here people put links to pages about other people who share their name, so people know exactly which John Doe they should be thinking of. However, so far as I can tell, I'm the only Mark Shoulson in the world, so anything attributed to that name is being attributed to me . Oh dear. It's not so incredible; Shoulson is a rare name—as far as I know, all the Shoulsons out there, of whatever variant spelling, are all related. mark@kli.org...