I was born in Singapore in 1978 and am now working back in Singapore. About a million miles of travel separate the two clauses of that sentence.

Education
I hold an A.B. (magna cum laude) in Economics from Harvard, where I graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 2001. My senior thesis was on the way income affects the preferences for living in urban areas. I also delivered a few lectures on Dialects of English for a linguistics class.

Work
I do policy work at the Singaporean Ministry of the Environment and Water Resources, on climate change and air pollution issues. But since I spend most of my day talking and writing about those issues, dsng.net is my break from all that.

Writing
I wrote for three editions of the budget travel guide Let's Go (Let's Go: Britain and Ireland 1999, Let's Go: London 2001, and Let's Go: New York City 2002), and was the editor of the 2000 edition of Let's Go: Britain and Ireland. That means I've lived in Boston, London, and New York. I miss all three cities. I miss Harvard Square and Fenway Park; I miss the record stores of Berwick St; I miss the East Village and Brooklyn. Yes, travel writing was a pretty sweet job. This site was launched in 2000, with the blog added in 2002.

Hobbies
The time in Boston was also the start of my obsession with baseball and the Boston Red Sox. Besides that, I'm a music, film, art, American literature, English language, and trivia buff, a fact which stood me in good stead when I won the "Singapore's Brainiest Scholar" game show in 2003 but otherwise means I'm pretty much just a trainspotter. I also do some amateur DJing.

Random bits
I'm obsessive, compulsive, and sometimes disorderly. I think "The Simpsons" is the greatest TV show of all time. I hate urban legends and conspiracy theories, partly because I think they try to hard to attach order to an entropic world. Oh, and I drink way too much Pepsi and Coke.