Kevin B. McGowan

I'm married to Jen and the extremely proud daddy of Nora. We live in a crumbling purple house on the north side of a crumbling college town in a much more rapidly crumbling state. When I'm not working, raising a child, being a husband or maintaining my house I enjoy riding my bike long distances in embarrassing outfits. In addition to Nora's blog, I have a flickr photostream that is also mostly Nora. :)

For the decade between undergrad and graduate school I was one of the morlocks responsible for the University of Michigan's web infrastructure. Systems I ran and software I wrote (or had a hand in) were used and critically relied upon by literally hundreds of thousands of people every day. It was an IT job so almost all of the managers I interacted with were absolutely incompetent (I was half programmer and half manager so I must have been at least half incompetent), but my employees and peers were mostly astonishingly talented.

Back in undergrad (before ubiquitous cell phones, before 14.4 modems, in the days of NCSA Mosaic) John Lawler suggested I write the web version of the chomskybot. So I did. Many years later, while applying to graduate schools, I found myself in the office of one of Chomsky's closest colleagues and long-time collaborators; so I asked to use his computer and I showed it to him. I got into that school anyway. :)

I enjoy mustard. I play a musical instrument called the bodhrán. I can bark like a dog (it's remarkably convincing).