Robert J. Simmons: Home →

Etc.

Disambiguation

I used to be pretty hard to Google, though this has become significantly less true as time goes on. My name is pretty common, and this page shares the top of the Google listings for "Robert J. Simmons" with an fine portraitist, the Amazon profile of of some dude who likes alt-metal, and a retired police officer. Other people named "Robert Simmons" are involved in Princeton, in computer science, and in programming languages specifically. There's even another "Robert John Simmons" who fought in the civil war.

One significant person named "Rob Simmons" used to be a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives until he was defeated by Joe Courtney in the closest House race of the 2006 elections - my friend who was at Wesleyan (in Rob Simmons' former district) was very amused by all her classmates encouraging others to "Stop Rob Simmons." This Rob Simmons ran to challenge Chris Dodd in the 2010 elections, but ended up losing in the GOP primary to Linda McMahon, who then lost in the general election to Richard Blumenthal. If Fmr. Rep. Simmons has won, I would have again become difficult to Google.

Just to be clear, I am none of these people, though more than one person has emailed me to ask how they could contribute to my Senate campaign. I may have future career options saving the world from evil; since that Rob Simmons exists in the future, I can't say with absolute confidence that I am not he, I guess!

Things that totally aren't papers

Most of these "papers" are from SIGBOVIK, which you should contribute to and attend! Yes, you!

Chicago

I spent the year after graduation in Chicago, where I worked for a nonprofit as part of Project 55's Public Interest Program. I worked on community wireless project that faced many challenges but still had modest successes.

I helped to maintain the website of the Church of the Epiphany in Chicago, which I attended while I lived there.

Parkways

My friend Tom Murphy has embarked on an insane quest to run the length of every street in Pittsburgh. In search of a less insane goal, I decided I would like to try to run the length of the interesting streets in Pittsburgh in one go. Pittsburgh has a lot of interesting roads that wind through very different neighborhoods and have very different terrain. This is a bit of a haphazard project, of course, because there's no definition of an interesting road. Interesting roads are somewhat long, have interesting features and go through interesting places. Beechwood is the canonical example of an interesting road.

Below are some of the roads I have run or want to run (if I have completed a road, I link to the run where I completed it).