I'm Peter Saint-Andre and you've found my home on the web.
This page is static, but I frequently update my online journal and post to Twitter as @stpeter.
I'm a technologist, best known for my work on XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber), an open standard for instant messaging, presence, and real-time collaboration used by Google, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, and many other companies. I've also done work on internationalization, privacy, security, and related topics. In March 2010 I started a two-year term on the IESG as co-director of the Applications Area at the IETF. In my spare time, I run the jabber.org IM service and even do a bit of programming now and then.
I'm a writer, having authored The Tao of Roark, a dictionary of philosophy entitled The Ism Book, a book of essays entitled Randian Reflections, a book of poems entitled Ancient Fire, translations of Sappho, Horace, and Epicurus, and miscellaneous essays.
I'm a musician, having written a few dozen songs, composed a handful of extended works for solo classical guitar, set to music the Langston Hughes poem Freedom's Plow, and arranged half a dozen works by the progressive rock band Yes for solo electric bass. After I record all that, I plan to work on solo bass recordings of works by Duke Ellington and, if time and talent allow, Bach's Cello Suites.
I'm an advocate of free culture and the public domain, having republished numerous public domain texts at The Monadnock Press and written the essays Who's Afraid of the Public Domain? and What Is Copyright?. Everything on my websites is covered under the CC0 Public Domain Dedication unless expressly labelled otherwise.
I'm a student of philosophy. My favorite thinkers are Lao Tzu, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Epicurus, the gnostic Jesus, Abelard, William of Ockham, Spinoza, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Lin Yutang, Ayn Rand, and Hao Wang.
I'm a lover of the arts. My favorite painters are Jan Vermeer and Joaquin Sorolla. My favorite sculptors are Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French. My favorite playwrights are Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Ibsen. My favorite novelists are Victor Hugo, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Ayn Rand. My favorite poets are Sappho, Horace, Andrew Marvell, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, A.E. Housman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, and Timothy Steele. My favorite composers are J.S. Bach and Duke Ellington, followed by Chopin, Dvořák, Albeniz, and Granados. My favorite musicians are Glenn Gould, Julian Bream, Stephen Isserlis, Patricia McCarty, Andras Schiff, Alicia De Larrocha, Earl Hines, Joe Pass, Ella Fitzgerald, Keith Jarrett, Marcus Roberts, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, George Winston, Michael Hedges, Fairport Convention, Renaissance, and Yes. My favorite compositions are Bach's Goldberg Variations and Cello Suites.
I'm a vibrant loner, a poetic geek, a cerebral musician, a practical philosopher, a spiritual non-believer, a progressive libertarian, a secular conservative, a free-market liberal, a rational patriot, an inhabitant and admirer of America and the Anglosphere and Western Civilization.
I like conversations, not comments. If you enjoy what you find here, feel free to contact me.