Dilip Barman's Home Page

Thanks for visiting. I am a photographer, teacher, health coach, and computer scientist. I have been taking pictures most of my life, own Vibrant Memories Photography, and teach digital photography. I am a certified Food for Life instructor, teaching, evidence-based nutrition and cooking classes for preventing disease and promoting health. I have significant experience as a Senior Software Engineer focused on User-Centered Design with background in areas such as operating system and multimedia application development, advanced technology pioneering, software reuse, and consulting. I've been active on the internet since the late 1980s, and am pursuing a Computer Science Ph.D. at UNC, researching using knowledge representation (artificial intelligence) to add flexible semantics to a hypertext (think of understanding in advance what to expect when you follow a web link, for example).

I love to teach; courses I've offered range from computer literacy and programming to film studies, photography, cooking and nutrition, artificial intelligence, and motivational seminars and practical talks on adopting new technologies in a manner focused on ease of use. I teach:

• Math and computer science at DeVry University,
• Film studies at NC School of Science and Math,
• Philosophy at Duke University's Osher Lifelong Learning Institute,
• Philosophy as well as photography and computer courses at Duke Continuing Education,
• Food for Life Cancer Project, Diabetes Initiative, Kids Health, Kickstart your Health, and Employee Wellness Program classes through various venues,
• Healthful living through private coaching,
• Cooking and photography through the Carrboro ArtsCenter,
• Photographing babies as a childbirth educator for UNC Hospitals,
• Photography for the Town of Cary,
• Photography for the Town of Morrisville,
• A variety of courses including film studies at senior centers in Chapel Hill and Cary NC, and
• Cooking at Whole Foods Market.

I have many interests and hobbies such as growing and showing roses, reading, fine film, listening to music, and bicycling. I love to cook - see my chocolate baklava recipe and 1-page guides to cooking grains, steaming vegetables, and cooking reference. I was a featured chef at the first annual Cooking Show (October 18, 2003). I am very involved in community organizations such as the Triangle Vegetarian Society (don't miss our fabulous annual Thanksgiving feast, the country's largest vegetarian Thanksgiving) and my greatest discovery in the past ten years or so, Servas, a world-peace organization that seeks to build understanding through friendship.

The arts inspire me. I'm lucky to live in the Triangle region of North Carolina, where we have perhaps the country's most important documentary film festival, Full Frame, and the world's largest contemporary dance festival, ADF; I try to attend as much of each of these annual events as I can. Starting in 2006, I have a blog about some cultural events I attend, as well as blogs about my garden and my cooking.

For years, I had maintained a calendar of local events related to peace and justice. I am excited about an event on November 10, 2001 that I had helped to organize, co-sponsored by a dozen groups, which had four speakers discussing various approaches to peace and justice, followed by facilitated conversations in small groups. It was very successful and we hope to eventually have a follow-up event. In October, 2001, I put together a flyer on environmental justice, showing some relationships between vegetarianism and world peace and justice.

I trust that some information below will appeal to you! Reload the page after a moment to see another of 15 random images above! You can also visit me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and, though I don't use it often, MySpace.

Please sign my guestbook; you can also view it

• Cool Sites of the Day
• Lists of Exciting Web Sites

• Local (UNC, Triangle, NC) Information
• Some of my presentations, such as
  • One day course introductions to the internet and creating web pages
  • Two-hour Introduction to the Internet
  • Introduction to Relational Databases
  • Organic Rose Gardening
  • Why Vegetarian
  • Animal Rights
  • Four talks and cooking demonstrations at the July 2002 World Vegetarian Congress in Scotland
• Vegetarian Resources including the Triangle Vegetarian Society home page; we have an active group - please consider becoming a member and coming to our many events
• Green Thumb Hints for indoor and outdoor plants (also see my rose page)
• Some of my favorite books
• Music Information
• Internet Movie Database is a tremendous film resource. Check out my film reviews on IMDB. (Another good site is ScreenIt! if you want to know in tremendous detail about anything that you may find objectionable in a film.)
• In early 2006, I started a weblog or online journal where I hope to capture thoughts on cultural events I attend; you can view it at dilip2006.blogspot.com
• Bicycling Information ... including about my folding Bike Friday!
• India, Hindu Philosophy
• Artificial Intelligence Resources
• Information on Academic Research ... and UNC research resources
• WWW Search and Information, HTML, etc. Check out WebCrawler!
• Some of my friends with home pages
• Miscellaneous - 800 Numbers, Internet Index, OS/2, Graphics, Kids, Medicine

• About me
  • On the Myers-Briggs Personality Test, I am a personality type ENFJ. I have taken this test several times (the formal test professionally given to my team at work in 1994 or 1995, and unofficial versions I tried on my own on the internet since then) and consistently score strongly Extrovert (vs. Introvert), strongly Intuitive (vs. Sensing), strongly Feeling (vs. Thinking), and moderately Judging (vs. Perceiving). In a seminar on August 11, 2003, I was administered a "Personality Type Inventory", a new test that is supposed to give the same results, and scored ENF and a questionable P for an ENFP type.
    In late December 1999, I found the Enneagram personality typing that assigns one of nine types. I tried two tests and in both I was strongly of type 2, The Helper / Giver / Caretaker. The first test also gave me moderate scores for type 5, The Thinker / Investigator / (Perceptive) and type 7, The Generalist / Enthusiast. The other, newer one rated me 10 for type 2, 3 for type 3, The Motivator, and 2 for type 4, The Artist / (Intuitive). Other types are (1) Reformer / Idealist, (6) Skeptic, (8) Leader / (Aggressive), and (9) Peacemaker (Easy-going).
    Enneagram Personality Styles has more in-depth interpretation, and Enneagram Personality Dynamics has many additional links.
  • In December 2005, I found an interesting Political Compass site that allows you to quantify where you stand on economic and social scales; you can take a simple 5-7 minute questionnaire - my results were -7.13 on an economic left/right scale and -6.72 on a social libertarian/authoritarian one.
  • My unix finger information
  • Recent Fun things I've done
    I hope to occasionally throw in a digitized picture, e.g. of my travels ... you may enjoy visiting my library of pictures, as well as my photo.net portfolio
• Information sources
  • ILTweb Virtual Reference Desk List of dictionaries, thesauri, etc.
  • Tech Reports Unified computer science TR index
  • FAQs An incomplete but still large list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
  • Library of Congress gopher
• UNC resources
  • Spring'95 WWW Seminar including my course home page and my research into social aspects of the web
  • Fall 1997 WWW Programming Class including my course home page
  • Spring 1998 Advanced Java Programming Class including my course home page
  • UNC Computer Science Department Home Page including a list of department people
  • Hints for preparing a thesis proposal
  • Sunsite UNC-Chapel Hill home page

Old References

I created my home page back in 1994 when the number of home pages numbered (only) in the thousands. Since then, many of these links and pages of mine have become a lot less useful - finding online weather, stock quotes, etc. is no longer a novelty. I've also not maintained several of these pages. I'll group older references here for any value they still may have.

• Online Proceedings for Hypertext '96 I was involved in putting papers onto the web from this conference held in March 1996 in Bethesda, MD. This is probably useful as an archival reference for these papers.
• Weather
• Hawaii, US Travel
• US Government, Taxes
• Graph of IBM Stock Price/Volume ... or other stock charts. (Stockmaster, originally a prototype at MIT's AI Lab, is a long-time resource that I linked to back in 1994 or 1995 before this kind of investment information became much more common.)
  There is also a Security APL Market Watch market indicator.
• MPEG videos, pictures (I used to do applications programming for near video on demand for IBM 1993-4)

Search the internet

Interactive Maps and Driving Directions (US Addresses)

For an interactive map or driving directions between two locations in the United States, specify locations via zip or address - try "27701" for zip code 27701, "123 E. Main Street, Durham, NC", "123 E. Main Street, 27701", etc., then click the button to "Map" or "Calculate directions".

Send me email (barman@cs.unc.edu) if you have any suggestions for my pages or if you would just like to say hi.

Since Oct. 15, 1995, you are visitor according to web counter (I've had this page since late 1994).