I'm interested in technology, city planning, architecture, engineering, politics, the arts (particularly film), open education and a host of other areas.

I live in Seaside, CA and travel frequently throughout California. Up until about 2000 I traveled frequently to and throughout Western Europe and also quite extensively throughout the United States and to a lesser degree in Mexico.

In my Babel profile listed to the right, you will note I am a native speaker of Swiss German (Schwyzerdütsch). My dialect is an interesting amalgam of the dialect spoken in Bern (where my mother's parents were born), Solothurn (where my mother was born and where I spent nearly every summer of my youth) and Züridütsch (from my father's side). This has the interesting effect of "notifying" German speaking Swiss people that I might be foreign born, a fact which generally takes astute listeners only ten minutes or so to figure out. [Native born speakers of Swiss German typically speak only the dialect of the community from which they originate. I was born in Los Angeles and I just adopted the parts of each Swiss regional dialect which I liked best!]