Peter Pawlowski

My friends made fun of me for my old site because it was so boring. Well hah! Now this is what you get, a bare bones super simple site with all kinds of goofy stuff about me.

I live in Pittsburgh, PA. Yeah, it's kind of backwards sometimes but I love it. Every time I travel to some other city that's all modern and full of fancy people with their fancy gadgets and straight roads and excessive hipness, I invariably end up looking forward to returning to my corner of Pennsylvania where life is simple, bridges are plentiful, and the world never stops changing and staying the same.

I spend an awful lot of time at Vivisimo, which is just a few miles from me on the other side of town in Squirrel Hill. I'm pretty sure I work there and have been doing so since 2002, which, it turns out, is quite some time. The company has grown dramatically, and so have I, but it's still a group of impressively cool people that just keep getting impressively cool things done.

Once upon a time I was a student at Carnegie Mellon. After four years I managed to escape with undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and German. I almost escaped Pittsburgh, too, but luckily it ended up stealing me from a terrible fate in California and I've remained here since.

I really like language. Whether it's general linguistics topics or specific obscure or not so obscure languages, I can't get enough. Ask people who know me and they'll tell you that I just won't shut up about language. Actually it turns out that most people in casual conversation don't get all worked up about the intimate and fascinating details of things like consonant density in Welsh or the history of the Georgian writing system, so I tend to avoid those topics. But be forewarned: raise the subject and I will not let you escape. I'll also take this opportunity to plug a brilliant and mind-blowing book called Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong. Dense, but fantastic stuff!

I bought a new house in August, 2006 in the Bloomfield neighborhood of Pittsburgh (but really close to Lawrenceville) and I've been working real hard on it. Well, I still am, there's tons of stuff still to be done. You may notice there are some maps in my house. There are more now. There will be even more in the future. I guess you could say I really like maps.

I enjoy taking photos, and I'm not super good at it but some of them turn out pretty nice. Honestly though the ones I really like most are of the friends and family I love. Here's a whole pile of them to take a look at. I'm still learning all the ins and outs of this photography thing, and a digital SLR sometimes makes it too easy. Maybe I really ought to be getting my hands in some chemicals?

Pittsburgh's great because it's really close to West Virginia, which is just beautiful. I especially like to go there to go underground and explore caves. I'm in the Pittsburgh Grotto, a caving club here in town, and we go out and check out caves all over the place. It's a really great group of folks, you should stop by a meeting some time and then go and get dirty with us!

It kind of happened unintentionally, but I seem to have become one of the world's foremost experts on Apsit Brothers lamps. That's right, I've been collecting these things, and now people email me asking all kinds of crazy questions about them as if I know what the deal is. Well, I do know that they're nice to have around, I mean who can argue with a pioneer dude offering his animal friend a cob of corn?

As if you haven't had enough of me already, I'm now about to tell you that I also enjoy crocheting. It's a habit I just can't break. It would be nice if I had better documentation of all the projects I've done, but seeing as the majority have been gifts, they're tough to round up to take photos of.

UNESCO World Heritage sites I've been lucky enough to see:

• Historic Centre of the City of Salzburg
• Palace and Gardens of Schönbrunn
• Historic Centre of Prague
• Cologne Cathedral
• Museumsinsel (Museum Island), Berlin
• Dresden Elbe Valley
• Old town of Regensburg with Stadtamhof
• Vatican City
• Historic Centre of Rome
• Aflaj Irrigation Systems of Oman
• Old Town of Galle and its Fortifications
• Sacred City of Kandy
• Tower of London
• Old and New Towns of Edinburgh
• Grand Canyon National Park
• Independence Hall
• Mammoth Cave National Park
• Statue of Liberty
• Monticello and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville
• The Rideau Canal

I hope to add many more to that list in the future.

I'm pretty certain that's about all you are willing to hear about me, I mean for crying out loud I'm sick of myself already! So how about we turn the tables and you can get me back by instead rambling on about yourself? Open invitation here, show no mercy!