Nicole was born in Arkansas, which does not rhyme with Kansas, in the mid 1980s. After spending most of her childhood in northwest Arkansas, things took a turn for the wild in 1999, and she’s lived all over the place since then. Currently, she calls College Station, Texas home while she works on a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering. Before that, she attended Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio for her B.S.E. and Cornell University for her M.S. Between homework and research, Nicole cycles, writes fantasy, takes photos, and goes to every Texas A&M athletic event she can.

Although she’s used this blog since 2005, Nicole has been blogging since 2002 on various sites. Right now, WordPress is her software of choice. Someday she might get around to importing some of her writing from other spheres to this blog.

Random Facts

• Gnome is Nicole’s nickname both on- and offline, thanks to a high school lecture gone wrong.
• Nicole wrote a novel at fourteen, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro at fifteen, and graduated from high school at sixteen.
• Two-and-a-half years in Germany and six semesters of 300-level German mean that Nicole is–or was?–more or less fluent in German.
• After reading a related article at age eight, Nicole informed her classmates that she was going to live on the International Space Station one day. Some things haven’t changed.
• Nicole doesn’t get along with Apples. She carried her Zen Micro (and now her Zen and her Android) with pride.
• Thanks to Amy and her Irish friends, Nicole is thoroughly obsessed with the Dublin music scene. The Frames are her favorite band.
• Mark‘s refusal to let her use an HTML editor has made Nicole a fanatical hand-coder.
• Although she doesn’t do it as much as she used to, Nicole likes playing in Photoshop and taking pretty pictures.
• One of those pretty pictures got published in a fishing guide once.
• Another time she earned some extra money by reading translated intertitles alongside live musical accompaniment at screenings of the silent F.W. Murnau films Der Gang in die Nacht and Schloss Vogeloed.
• She also has a running list of strange ways guys have hit on her. It’s hard to say who tops it, but it may be the Parisian men who threw their keys at her when she was thirteen. Weirdos.
• Nicole loves her Fightin’ Texas Aggies, unless they’re playing the Arkansas Razorbacks, in which case her heart is torn asunder. Though she attends many sports, her first and greatest love is basketball.
• She’s been known to cycle an average of 54 miles a week.
• These days most of her time is spent playing in and around wind tunnels in her own little effort to improve the world.