Hobbies

Music

I love playing electric bass and drums (and a bit of ukulele), mostly with rock and funk music. I've been playing bass since 2008, while I picked up drums during my undergrad at Pitt thanks to George Stetten's Music Engineering Lab. Nowadays, I mostly just jam along with songs I love or with friends.

Fun Fact: There's a Youtube conspiracy that I'm dead from when I used to post bass videos as a teenager (see right).

Video games

I've loved playing video games for as long as I can remember, when I was 3 years old borrowing my older half-sister's Game Boy to play Pokemon and Donkey Kong. I still wake up early before work to have time to game and start my day off on a fun note.

Fun fact: A few years back I tried to count all of the games I've played/beaten (>250!), and I recently made a spreadsheet to organize the data. See snippet to the right.

Apparently I died. I'll let you guess which of these comments are real versus my friends just trolling. It's about 50-50 at this point.

Beer Homebrewing

At the start of the pandemic, a Christmas gift beer brewing kit kicked off this hobby. I brew a beer about every 1-3 months, making 3 gallon batches. I keep a pretty detailed log of the stuff I make. I particularly love wheat beers and IPAs, though any beer is good beer by me.

Fun fact: My fiancé (Kat Zougari, some one who made the About page's background!) lovingly designed the bottle labels for my homebrew creations, all of which are named after spells in D&D.

Electronics

A mix of a hobby and a useful skill, I only got interested in electronics after taking a fantastic circuits class in undergrad. Since then, I've done lots of simple electronics activities, from useful things like fixing oven burner receptacles and re-soldering my bass pickup wires, to fun things like synchronizing LEDs with Tetris music for a Biology+Tetris themed float.

Fun fact: I have a Bluetooth dry EEG headset that I'd love to use for controlling something (probably something binary since the signal is very noisy...), but haven't figured out a good idea for yet. If you have any, let me know!

A wi-fi controlled coffee maker setup I put together back in my undergrad engineering hall. Didn't get the automated coffee ground part to work before graduating, but got the wireless water dispersal and power on going!