The author

1. In short: I’m a happy, ideas guy who wants to make beautiful things, especially on the web. Things that help many many, even a little.
   
   
2. I lived in Guadalajara, Mexico since childhood though I was born elsewhere.
3. I love the world. I’ve travelled around a lot of Mexico, sometimes on extended family roadtrips, sometimes with my dad, who works all across the country. Abroad, I’ve been all over the US, which has always felt home to me. In one life, I worked in San Francisco for about a year. Once, in another life, I lived about a year in Japan (Tokyo). I’ve also spent some months in several cities across Western Europe (London, Oxford, Madrid, Antwerp) and some others in southeast Asia (Thailand, Singapore). I’ve also briefly visited Canada and Cuba, which is as much as the Americas as I so far know.
4. I have a good old bunch of photos on Flickr, an old bunch of links at Del.icio.us, and a good, frequently-updated bunch of books at my Amazon wish list.
5. I once went to the 2005 Fall Startup School, had a blast, and made some fascinating friends there I still keep in touch with. I wrote a travelog, Gravity Overcome (in Spanish despite the title), about the whole experience, which involved an Esperanto gathering, Boston, an Edward Tufte course, and a couple of NY weeks.
6. I’m a format freak. I bold and italicize and hyperlink and fiddle until I’m too tired to write. It’s probably just part of my OCD (like how I can’t stand an open drawer or closet). An elementary school teacher once told me I had a talent for highlighting. I’ve always obsessed about it since. I’m big into information design, which I conceive as mostly knowing how to highlight.
7. I love English. Practically everything I want to read these days is in English and most people with whom I care to talk understand the language.
8. I’m really into spoken languages in general, I also love and have studied and spoken French, Japanese, Mandarin, German, Esperanto and toki pona
9. I don’t believe in gods nor absolute authorities. I dislike and distrust, intensely, religions and governments.
10. I consider religiosity at best a character flaw, and not a minor one. It means you either won’t, or can’t, or daren’t think honestly about your life.
11. “I have weighed the evidence as best I can, and I do not believe the universe to be evil, a reply which in these days is called atheism.”
12. I believe in free markets.
13. I leave comments scattered here and there all over the web. I’m trying to keep track of them in this cameo list.
14. I’m big into economics and finance. Economics, in particular, I view as nothing less than the systematic study of human action, a la Ludwig von Mises.
15. Morally and politically I’m a libertarian, economically I’m an anarchocapitalist.
16. Full name is Eliazar Parra Cardenas. I sometimes go by char for friends, and by elzr on the web. Lately, eli has been a convenient moniker: short, easily pronounced all over the world and satisfyingly boygirl.
17. Not quite a quick thinker, more like an obsessive ruminant.
18. Bookworm I am. If you ever meet me you’ll probably walk away with several books you have to read.
19. I’m a formist. Math and language have always come easily to me.
20. I’ve always been a big listmaker but lately, it has become a serious addiction. Some examples: exotic names, favorite words, fascinating things about the English language, nicknames for Google, little ideas, a jew list... I’ve list incubators, showcasing lists for the many things I like, list of favorite songs (1200+)... Damn, I made this personal intro a list and even gave the blog itself one. It suits my ruminative nature to let thought sediment in them and it’s a great pleasure to gradually compile them, like solving a puzzle or collecting butterflies—Lexicographers must have the best of times…
21. I mostly read nonfiction, mostly in English, but I actively search for it in other languages.
22. Fictionwise, I mostly read science fiction, the genre that has always felt home to me. I treasure scifi for both it’s sense of wonder (sensawunda) and its sense of could, both topics I must write about someday… Some of my favorite, most important books ever, belong to the genre: Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder, Charles Stross’s Accelerando, John Varley’s Persistence of Vision, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation.

This site

1. The blag started on February 8, 2006 with this post.
2. On March 5, 2011 the whole site got a biggish makeover that made the blag decidedly just a part of the bigger site. The makeover was inspired by the textual minimalism of Alex Payne’s al3x.net
3. There is no official subject to the blog, no niche it attempts to fill, no target audience it aims for. It’s just about my loves, my thoughts, my writings, my life. I do write to be read but I write about what I would like to read.
4. The above said, I’m very into the web, languages, the future, design (particularly interface and information design), philosophy, computers, and economics. If that’s your fix, you should like it here.
5. English is of course preferred but you may comment back in either Spanish, Esperanto, French, German, Japanese, or Toki Pona, and have some fairly good chance of being understood. By at least me that is.
6. Comments that are either spam or pointless insults will be summarily deleted. Anything else goes.
7. Ocasionalmente escribo en español bajo la etiqueta de Spanish.
8. If you YubNub (and you should!), you can google within the blog through the “elzr” command.
9. This blog began running on Typo, but it is now so heavily modded to be almost it’s own engine. On the balance I think it was a mistake using a 3rd-party engine, I should have started from scratch. Yes, it would have been extremely lousy at the beginning but by now I would own this blog in a way that I don’t right now—there are still too many dark, hidden patches I barely understand. The law of leaky abstractions is a bitch.
10. The “{time units} delta” title on the homepage refers to the time that has passed since the last post. The title is a homage to Charles Stross’s fantastic Accelerando, where the word is used as a noun to mean divergence between “copies” (as when characters in a light-speed vessel refer to the cultural delta of the faster world outside) and as a verb to create a divergent “copy” (as when one character commits suicide and asks not to be delta-ed). Since I see this blog as my digital self (I’m in fact planning for it to outlive me), the word seemed fitting.
11. “In my opinion it is much more true that the thoughts of a living writer are in any printed copy of his book than that they are in his brain.” (Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 7.364)
12. Somehow I managed to write 75 posts on August 2006. I’m still baffled.
13. Infodesign Challenge has been in several ways one of the most popular posts so far, getting mentioned in BoingBoing, Kottke, and Information Aesthetics.
14. Hyperscript was also popular, being mentioned in Joe’s Blog, making the Reddit homepage, and being bookmarked by more than a hundred in del.icio.us
15. Imagery, which isn’t a blog post, but which is hosted under the blog’s domain has been mentioned on a shitload of places.
16. I often talk about ideas because that’s what I define my life by. Let others define their lives by people, drama, objects, or accomplishments. Does it follow that ideas are the most important thing in the whole word? Asking me is like asking a chef which is the greatest of the senses or a libertine what’s the greatest thing two people can do together.. There, the idea that ideas aren’t necessarily all-important is an idea I much appreciate. The idea of self-reference, like here, is also an old chum. The idea of personifying ideas is turning out surprisingly fertile. The idea of the hyper-self-aware writer gets old.
17. Often I tweak, fix or even completely rewrite whole posts. I tend to use this blog as a way to force me to congeal ideas out of whim air. I throw them out and start polishing spurred by public scrutiny. Plus, I don’t write for you, I write for the future.

Contact

New comments are down on the blag for a while. Meanwhile, use hello@elzr.com to say hi.