Home of Thomas J. Clancy

Writer, Software Developer, Philosopher, Artist and Independent Consultant

~ In Business Since Tuesday ~

Bio

For the past thirteen years I've been working as a software engineer. I hold a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Thiel College, a small liberal arts school in Western Pennsylvania. I'm also an aspiring writer who has written a number of essays (my favorite form) on and off over the years. I also write really bad poetry, short stories and have attempted several novels. I also enjoy writing technical pieces about computing, philosophy and science. I am a member of the International Hi IQ Society as well as an IEEE Computer Society member and a member of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery).

My other various interests include reading, something I do entirely too often (or so my wife would have you believe), solving puzzles such as brain teasers, crosswords, etc., and playing computer games and board games such as GO and Chess. I am an artist and enjoy working in pencil, pastels and oil paints. I love to cook, too, and have been trying to perfect my skill at cooking various vegetarian Indian dishes. I enjoy working through math problems even though I am a horrible mathematician, thinking about various philosophical topics (philosophy of mind, existentialism, epistemology, aesthetics, etc.) and listening to music; I'm a fan of classical music as well as blues, new age, alternative, Celtic, and hard rock. I play the guitar and I've recently taken up learning the flute, but so far I can only squeak out a few notes.

Latest Goings On

Sunday, November 28, 2004

My wife and I are moving. We've sold our house but we've not yet found a suitable new home. Times are tough, salaries are very low, mine especially, which is why we're moving (it's very sad), and I suppose that whenever we see a lesser home it just doesn't feel right. But we need to "downsize", as the corporate kiddies say these days. An truthfully, that's not such a bad thing, I don't think. Downsizing one's home and one's life allows one to take stock; to stand back and reassess. But most importantly... Well... I'm sure that there's something important to be learned in all this and when I learn it I'll get back to you.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

This is my result from taking the Jung Personality test. An odd coincidence since I am a software architect. Kinda cool, I thought.

INTP - "Architect". Greatest precision in thought and language. Can readily discern contradictions and inconsistencies. The world exists primarily to be understood. 3.3% of total population.

Free Jung Personality Test (similar to Myers-Briggs)

Writings

The following are links to some of my writing that I've published myself at this site. Self-publishing is free, after all, and while no one may read these, at least they’re available to be read. How I get people to come here, I don’t know.

Essays

Technical Essays	Description
How to Build a Better Rice Cooker	This essay discusses the future of smart appliances by merging wireless networking, presence and instant messaging technologies.
A Tale of Two Endians	A piece on an Endian puzzle that led us (a frazzled group of programmers debugging code during crunch time) to mull over it until I figured it out. I then wrote about the puzzle we discovered and the Endian problem in general and submitted it to the C/C++ User’s Journal which had accepted it for publication and then a year later paid me a kill fee because they restructured the magazine and decided that my piece wasn’t appropriate for their new theme.
IMPP Agents	A piece on interactive, autonomous, instant messaging and presence applications.
Writing GO: A Programmer’s Notebook	In a naïve attempt to write a game engine that played the ancient oriental game of GO, I wrote, in parallel, a notebook as I designed and wrote pieces of the engine and the interface. I thought this might be interesting in itself.
Artificial Neural Networks: A Programmer’s Notebook	Yet another notebook, this one currently in development. I am researching artificial neural networks and have been reading some books and papers on theory and have been implementing my own ANN library in C++ so that I can experiment with the kinds of ANNs I’m researching. This notebook will be updated periodically. Also you can get the latest source code here.
A Peer Code Review Process	This is a work-in-progress and is designed as an introduction for software development teams to the idea of peer code reviews. It is the culmination of my experience and informal research and while its not quite finished, it can still be read and you can learn from it. Pardon the rather dry prose; this is never my intention, but some topics seem to put one in that state of mind when writing.

General Essays	Description
A Society of Cards	Reflections about life and my wallet, full of cards. *I had this linked to the actual essay, but an online journal called INTHEFRAY.COM has accepted it for publication. When its published I will restore the link to my essays on their site.*
A Telecommuter and His Dogs	Originally published in the Town Crier, a small, Youngstown, OH, newspaper, this essays concerns a short time in the life of a telecommuter.
The Million Dollar Idea	A short piece about what I’d thought had undoubtedly been a unique and prosperous idea. But as is always the case, my ideas come to me too late. I had a link to this piece on my website, but it has been recently accepted for publication in an online journal called New Works Review. Once published I will put a link to it on their site.
Siesta	A short piece about unemployment (a recurring pattern, it seams), outsourcing and a new pastime, my mid-day siestas.

Web Logs

Web Log Name	Description
Streams of consciousness	Public writings about various and sundry thoughts. There is no theme here, and many of the entries appear as streams of consciousness, which sometimes turns out pretty interesting.
Philosophical thoughts	This web log is concerned with my philosophical ramblings and other thoughts. Nothing too deep here yet, but there is time.
Programmer's notebook	This web log is used as a notebook or journal for my programming forays. In it I keep notes about things I’ve learned when attempting to design and write some piece of software. For example I once had attempted, foolishly of course, to write a computer game that played GO.

Short Stories

Story Title	Description
Elmoe the Inebriated Giant	An early short story about a fellow at a bar who has a run in with misfortune.

Unfinished Novels

Novel Title	Description
Bump the Bullet	One of my unfinished novels (a fictionalized memoir, really), subtitled “The Cocaine Chronicles.” It essentially chronicles a period in a young man’s life with drugs, alcohol, music and sex, although its mostly about the drugs.

Poetry

I’ve been writing bad poetry for many, many years. Well, since 1990, if I recall. I am dedicating a specific page to my poetry and should you be brave enough to actually want to read it you can click this link to get there (or just click the big Poetry above).

Books

Don’t forget to visit Amazon.com for your favorite books and discounts. You’ll find in my Book section, when complete, book reviews and links to their pages on Amazon.com

Intellectual Interests

The following are links to pages I've created inspired by my various intellectual interests. If some (or all) of these point to nothing then they are currently under construction.

Fun Stuff