false cognate: readme.txt

General Information

About me:

I've been running this site for several years now. I'm a scientist, DJ, musician, soccer player, and Chicago Cubs fan. Currently I work for a biotech startup company as the Director of Research. I am also the Hip-Hop Director at the Rice University radio station, and was formerly the Operations Manager and an Assistant Music Director.

I received my B.S. in biological chemistry in 1997 from the University of Chicago, and my Ph.D. in biochemistry and cell biology (my thesis was on a small area of plant genetics) from Rice University in 2005. My C.V. is available upon request.

If you have something interesting to tell me, or if you are looking to submit material for consideration on my radio show or at KTRU in general feel free to contact me. You can either leave a comment in any of the open threads on the site, or email me. My email address is easily constructable by appending the site name (falsecognate.org) to my real name.

About this site:

This site went up years ago as a way to promote a party series that my friends and I were doing. Those old pages, listing the DJ crew, affiliated groups, and flyers for the parties are still accessible if you know where to point your browser, but times change. Now this site mainly houses my occasional rants and raves about whatever topic comes to mind (usually something related to baseball, science, or politics), and the setlists and archived versions of my radio show, the Vinyl Frontier.

As an aside, you can listen to my radio show live in the Houston area on KTRU 91.7fm on Tuesday nights from 10pm to 1am. It's one of the longest running underground hip-hop mix shows in the Houston radio market. Playlists are archived here and some archived shows are located on my BitTorrent tracker.

There is a sub-site embedded for Urban Audio Assault, which was my semi-regular email newsletter detailing concerts and other events around the Houston area. The newsletter doesn't get sent anymore as I have grown too busy with work and other things, but I do try to keep the web listings up to date.

Please read:

General notes on social networks

Over the last decade or so, social networks of varying popularity and success have been formed, and I've joined most of them - Friendster, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Goodreads, Firefly, Six Degrees, the list goes on. Some of them are now defunct. The ones that were hot six months to a year ago are now not. The ones hot now probably won't be in six months to a year. This has led me to formulate my own general policy on how to handle all social networks because I got tired of typing in the same stuff over and over again, and becoming "friends" with the same people for the n^th time.

I have set all my social network accounts to prevent any notifications to email addresses. Read it again and let it sink in. That means I won't see your messages, friend requests, events, and god knows whatever else each of these sites does until I actually go to the site. So if you need to contact me in a hurry, social networking sites are not the method to do that. Send me an email or call me instead.

Notes on "friend" requests

I recognize that at least some of these sites are used for networking, especially MySpace for aspiring musicians. I encourage all aspiring artists to contact me, especially hip-hop related acts. However, I will not grant your "friend" request unless you meet certain specific requirements:

You are an actual friend of mine in real life. If you meet this requirement, you can ignore the rest. If you're not sure if you meet this requirement, you don't.
You must send me a message detailing who you are and why you are making said request.
You must provide contact information that doesn't involve using said social networks. Generally, that means email or phone.

That said, feel free to contact me. I'm really not as big of an asshole as you probably think after reading the above; I just value my time and it's become clear to me that all of these social networks, while useful in some ways, were sucking up more of my time than I liked.