Hello

Who I am

I am Jason McIntosh, a Perl hacker, technical writer, and entrepreneur who lives and works around Boston, Massachusetts, USA. In real life I often go by the nickname "jmac", mostly because it's fun to say but practically because any group setting I find myself in often contains at least one other Jason.

I run a startup that is developing Volity, a platform for Internet-based multiplayer casual games.

I used to be a bioinformaticist and cheminformaticist programmer at the Institute of Chemistry and Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. My primary project was ChemBank, which lets scientists learn and share discoveries about the biological activity of various chemical compounds using information gleaned from high-throughput screening.

My hobbies include card games and board games, which I both play and design, television production and podcasting.

You can learn more about me, and the things I do and make, at my homepage.

"Zendonut"?

Yes. I like donuts. I also enjoy playing Zendo.

Wikipedia stuff

Articles I have started

High-throughput screening, a technique for rapidly performing many biological experiments in parallel
Looney Labs, a small American game company
Warren Anatomical Museum, a storehouse of medical oddities and memorabilia
Three-point lighting, a common lighting technique used in film and photography
Nanoliter, a unit of measuring teeny-tiny amounts of liquid. Too teeny for wikipedia, in fact; it has since been merged into liter.

Agendas I pursue

I loathe fancruft. I don't delete it every time I see it, but will often get sufficiently riled up at a needlessly mile-long "References in popular culture" or "Trivia" section to pare things down. Folks, a couple of examples of something getting referred to by something else are OK, even valuable. Less OK is an exhaustive list of every single time something comes up somewhere else. You effectively end up with a catalog of everyone's favorite cartoons and webcomics that threatens to run longer than the main part of the article, and this is when it becomes time to bring the hammer down.