Hello. They call me Matt. I grew up in New York but now reside in Oakland, California. More on that below.

Since the age of three I've been a wildly passionate composer, performer, and critic of music. Despite spending most of my mental and physical energy creating and listening to sound, I still find myself having to somehow "earn a living." To that end, I'm currently working more or less full time at the University of California at Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory for various SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) projects, including the stunningly popular SETI@home which I've been working on since its inception. No, we haven't found any signs of alien intelligence yet. Nobody has. Anyway, I show up, administer some UNIX machines, make sure the network is running safely and securely, write data analysis software, and act as the main webmaster, among other things. And then I leave at the end of the day and get back to my music. I guess this formally answers the question "So what do you do, Matt?"

I was born on July 16, 1970 in upstate New York. I lived my first two years in Chester, and then the remainder of my childhood in Rockland County, a mere 30 minutes from the heart of Manhattan. Did I spend a lot of time in NYC while growing up? Not really. This is just one of the many regrets lodged in a tight muscle at the base of my neck.

I hated school. And why not? I pity any child which must suffer through countless days trapped within the American educational system. It seems obvious that crime, poverty, and general American stupidity are blatant symptoms of the weak planning, poor budgeting, and total corruption within our public school system. But then again, that's just me.

In any case, Rockland was a beautiful place to grow up, fraught with trees, parks, and areas of town containing buildings that haven't changed in over 100 years. I have fond memories riding my bike for miles and miles, around lakes, up hills, circumventing creeks, all the while praying that one day I will move someplace where stuff happens.

When I finally did leave Rockland they tore down all the trees and erected hundreds of baudy million-dollar homes from the rich and famous who wanted to live near New York City, but couldn't bear to reside in Westchester, New Jersey, or Long Island. Who could blame them? And they also levelled the diner where I hung out every other night during my adolescent years, and in its place is a parking lot for the biggest mall in the country east of the Mississippi. Thanks to pressure from the community preventing the developers from relocating an historic cemetery, there's an old burial ground complete with ancient headstones right in the middle of the mall parking lot. But anyway..

I survived a dreadful high school experience and left more or less unscathed. My only happy memories during this period of my life were when I snuck into the empty auditorium during lunch and played the grand piano. I also had access to the secret lighting booth where my stage crew friends stowed away a few chairs, a couch, a huge supply of Jolt cola, and some random artwork. We'd hide in there and take naps when necessary.

Pretty much my big problem with high school involved being trapped all day in a building with 2000 children from upper middle class white families. Outside of the few friends I had, the rest were so goddamn uninteresting I can't even think of anything funny to say about them. Anybody with any sense of creativity who went to high school in upstate New York will tell you the same thing.

Despite knowing full well how much I loathed academia, I got snared into going to college at the University of Binghamton (a fine State University of New York). I studied math and computer science under the presumption I would learn valuable skills which would make me an incredible asset for any company smart enough to hire me. I guess that is what most higher educational facilities would like you to believe, when you're forking over incomprehensible amounts of money so you could wither away in endless classes, writhing in uncomfortable, unergonomic chairs, growing more and more uninterested in the things in life you used to find fulfilling. If you are still in high school, I beg you to consider taking a few years off before college to travel and work and decide what you really want to do, lest you throw away the best years of your life earning a history degree which will yield you nothing but the right to ask yourself, "now what?"

For sanity's sake I also majored in music and composition, and would have majored in cinema had I the time. I managed to get by without ever studying, and graduated with an incredibly good GPA considering my proud lack of effort.

College served its main purpose, which was to keep me out of the work force for four years so the older generation could protect their jobs. Having no clue about what to do after my time in the holding pen ended, I chose to flip New York the bird and go elsewhere, fast. I stuffed my Colt with as much crap as would fit and headed west. I landed in Berkeley during the summer on 1992, and have been living in the East Bay ever since.

My ten-plus years in the San Francisco Bay Area have been interesting so far. I been fired from one job, laid off from another, and quit one in the middle of the day and never looked back. I had a short stint working in the morally bankrupt advertising business. I joined several bands that toured North America and Europe. I lived in five different rentals with ten different people (and four different cats) before finally buying a house. I found my soulmate Jenya, who is now my wonderful wife. Detailed stories about many of the above things (and way too much more) can be found within this web site. Happy reading.

Home