You've stumbled upon Daniel Mainz's stuff. Why?

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Who am I? Here's my carefully edited, objective, biography:

• I was born in the quiet, pastoral, charming community of Detroit, Michigan in 1970. Them being "eventful" times in the 'hood, my parents, like everyone else they knew, escaped to the suburbs. In our case, we landed three years later in Canton Township. Yep. Not much in that link, is there? Canton is that kind of town. Good skools, thow.
• After a childhood of wild debauchery, I felt I needed to attend a hopping college near a beach. So in the fall of 1987, I ran to The University of Chicago, a/k/a Party Central on the Sands of Lake Michigan. In order to maximize my free time, I decided to major in theoretical chemistry, and dabbled in undergraduate research with Prof. R. Stephen Berry. The belated result of this is a paper describing my work on clusters and the effects potential functions have on their phase behavior.
• Having breezed through with my S.B. (put those initials in the right order, bucko!) in 1991, I felt I needed to party some more. The sun, fun, and beaches were so great at Chicago, that I needed to find a school which also had all these things, but was in calmer surroundings. So in the fall of 1991 I found myself at Columbia University, where the students are better dressed, much better socially adjusted, and (amazingly) even more jingoistically proud of their Core Curriculum than we Chicago students are of our own. But hey, their diplomas are still written in Latin, so they must have reason to be so proud.
• I finished graduate school with lots of initials (M.A. 1992; M.Phil. 1995; Ph.D. 1996) from the Department of Chemistry. All of my work at Columbia has been in the group of Prof. Richard Friesner, and consists of:
  • Pseudospectral Electronic Structure Methodology. Paper
  • Geometry Optimization in ab initio calculations Paper
  • Electronic Structure Calculations of Transition-Metal Complexes Paper
  • Automated Methods of Force Field Parameterization based on Ab Initio Calculations. No Paper yet. Coming Soon!
  • My Ph. D. thesis.
• Presently, I am a postdoc with Prof. Wm. A. Goddard III at Caltech. In addition to the projects at Columbia which I continue to study, I am taking on the computer simulation of large macromolecular dendrimers. More about this, as I make progress.

Obligatory list of favorite links

I'm usually far too busy to stoop to web browsing (heh), but when I have a spare moment, I check the essentials:

• First, how the Detroit Tigers and the 1996-97 Stanley Cup Champion Detroit Red Wings are doing. Being a real man, I premise my masculinity on how other men wearing certain-colored uniforms perform in athletic exhibitions. When they win; I win. Back off, buddy!
• My newspaper and politics fixes:
  • The New York Times. Most of the news that's fit to digitize. And they throw in William Safire, too. And just because I live in LA now doesn't mean that I should go without the newspaper of record. Who needs the funnies?
  • The Times of London. So what if it is now yet another Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece? Even they can't hide the fact that the Tories were routed! Bring Back Clause Four! (fat chance)
  • The Nation. Yes, if you haven't figured it out by now, I'm a leftie, whatever that means. And no, being on the same campus where Reaganomics was born didn't cause me to wither up and die, though my weight and build may seem to indicate otherwise.
  • Tom Tomorrow's cartoons. No, this isn't a Dilbert link.
  • New! I've gotten fed up with being passively disgusted with Washington politics, and disturbed that the only ones who are making their points there are the Religious Right. I've finally started to do my citizen's duty to correspond with my legislators. Click here to view past letters I've written. (coming soon)
• ...and not only am I a liberal in these trying times. I also am a Macintosh devotee. I sure can pick 'em.
  • The oldest fully electronically edited weekly in cyberspace is also the best, TidBITS, a digest of hot Macintosh news.
  • To keep up with software updates, I check Macintouch and MacResource.
  • And occasionally, for laughs, I check out what the Spin Doctors are saying over at Apple.

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