i'm doug cook , proprietor of candiru.com. candiru, or more properly, candirú, is my very old and out-of-date personal website.

my apologies in advance for the sparse website. a few tidbits, should you care:

sometimes i'm too lazy to capitalize, as you've no doubt noticed.

i love music, and play drums, clarinet, and bass clarinet: jazz, funk, and weird electronic music that sounds like nothing so much as baby farts played backwards, interspersed with the perplexed mumbles of aliens solving crossword puzzles. i listen to almost anything. i am a media junkie, always in search of new veins in which to inject sensory experiences. this need extends to literature, film, poetry, art, food. help me! if you have a line on the particularly intense, bizarre, sublime, or just downright silly, let me know.

i am also a software engineer. for many years i designed audio software at silicon graphics ; for years after that, i helped people find pornography on the internet, uh, i mean i worked on an internet search engine, at inktomi , which then became part of yahoo. actually, i had a blast; it was, and is, quite a challenge to efficiently proffer a small set of salient results as the amount of garbage on the web rapidly balloons. i mean , cheesy pages like this one are cropping up like toxic mushrooms on a rain-soaked dungheap.

i also have a huge love for wine and food, and these days i have been building a little project of my own, a wine information search engine called able grape. i aim for it to be the world's best source for in-depth, geeky wine online information in any language.


what's a candirú?

ah, funny you should ask. properly speaking, i guess you didn't; i asked myself, and inscribed the response here:

a candirú (vandellia cirrhosa) is a small catfish inhabiting certain south american rivers. it is the only fish more feared than the piranha. i will leave it at that. ask me in person if you want the gory details.