Random Rants
I have a tendency to rant about crazy things (check out my musings). Here are some that I get a lot of comments on:- Are we living in a computer simulation?
- Arguments against calvinism
- Virtual Image - not really a rant, just a story.
Benjamin Beau Perry. The name strikes fear in the hearts of gamers.
I am a computer scientist, musician/composer, piano teacher, avid gamer, and a PhD student at the University of Delaware. (I passed the prelims! YAY!)
My current position is a software engineer with Cisco in Boxborough, Massachusetts. I am part of the Tech Center, which is an R&D group investigating new and upcoming technologies. I'm currently working on applying data mining and AI to various industry fields. Previous to that, I worked as a senior software scientist at Quantum Leap Innovations, a small company in Newark, Delaware. I researched and applied multiagent systems and probabilistic reasoning techniques.
I've also worked as a research programmer for the KDD group at KSU and as a web application developer for 4H in Kansas. I focused on Bayesian network programming in Java and server-side web applications in ASP.
I've been playing the piano since I was seven and programming since I was eight back in my home town of Topeka, Kansas, where I went to Seaman High School. I used to offer piano lessons in Delaware, but alas, life happens, and we had to move to a different state.
I am married to the world's greatest woman, Mrs. Jessica Perry and I have been married since 1999; we met in Junior High and somehow managed to stick together all that time. For reasons completely unimaginable by me, she agreed to marry me and has since made me the most happiest and most complete person anyone could possibly be!
We now have a cute little dog named Yankee. Yankee is part Pembroke Welsh Corgi and part spawn of evil. But he is a great pet regardless of his spurts of evilness.
Jessica Perry and Ben Perry
Colorful Philosophical Angels
On our trip back home from Maine in October of 2006, Jessica and I had to keep each other awake somehow, so we came up with a series of what-if scenarios that went like this:
- An angel dressed in white comes to visit you and asks you if you could relive any day of your life, what day would it be?
- An angel dressed in red comes to visit you and asks you if you could change any one major decision of your life, what would it be? The angel would allow you to live six months in an alternate time reality to play out that decision.
- An angel dressed in green comes to visit you and asks you to make a simple decision: have a utopian world-peace society, or be the leader of the first government of the colonization of Mars.
- An angel dressed in blue comes to visit you (potentially on Mars) and offers to let you explore the entire galaxy and all of its wonders with ultrafast space travel, although you are guaranteed to not find any life outside of earth, or you can discover an alien race but not have any breakthroughs in space travel for several hundred years.
