You can reach him by evaluating the following email address:

(string-downcase (concatenate 'string (subseq first-name 0 1) last-name))@gmail.com

He has a website:

http://vsedach.googlepages.com/index.html

And a blog:

http://carcaddar.blogspot.com/

He organizes the Calgary Lisp user's group.

Here's my entry for the RtL survey:

I, Vladimir Sedach, do solemnly offer these my responses to The Road to Lisp Survey:

When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?
I first started programming seriously in Scheme (DrScheme) in spring of 2002.

What led you to try Lisp?
I spent most of my last year in high school messing around with 3d graphics, which got me interested in doing programming more seriously. By that point, I was somewhat proficient in C and shell scripting. I didn't particularly like C, so I decided to look for a language that suited me better. First, it was Perl (which I liked even less), and then Python.

As luck would have it, one of the 3d programs I was using (Izware's Mirai) was written in CL, which at the time seemed large and complicated, but I was already sort-of exposed to Scheme (see below for an explanation). I went looking, and found Kent Pitman's Slashdot interview. This piqued my interest. From there, I heard about SICP. My local library not having a copy, I printed out the first chapter. Then the second. Then the third...

Finally, this whole computer science thing made sense! (Enough sense that I decided to major in mathematics).

Fast forward to first week of university. The "intro to CS" course is taught in Pascal. I learned (and subsequently forgot) enough Pascal in 3 days to pass the course "challenge" examination by writing a linked list implementation and a bunch of list-recursion functions.

Gradually, I moved my Scheming to Emacs, then, after reading about macros in Paul Graham's On Lisp, decided to move my Scheming to Common Lisping (the biggest hurdle to this was packages, for some reason), and here I am, a happy Lisper.

Where did your road originate?
In the gilded tan-grey halls of Stuyvesant HS sometime in the spring of 2000. Specifically, Mike Zamansky's really cool Introduction to Computer Science course. Scheme was used for a few weeks to present theoretical computer science. For some reason the Scheme portion wasn't that impressive (mostly I just remember one of the assignments was to write the basic arithmetic operators +-/*gcd, using lists for numbers). Now the Starlogo, that Starlogo and it's crazy turtles!

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
Since finally wrapping my head around call/cc and it's implications, I can say that I know most of Scheme pretty well.

Common Lisp is a different story. I learn new things through and about it all the time - all I know is there is a lot more to learn. I can't even say I know as much as the average Common Lisper, mostly because I don't think such a category exists yet (but there do seem to be a lot of CL beginners appearing recently - surely a good sign!).

What do you think of Lisp so far?
Everything I tried before Lisp seemed to hinder either my thinking about or executing solutions to problems. As an example, I spend a fraction of the time my classmates do on difficult CS assignments because I first write out and debug my algorithms in a subset of CL, and then transcribe them to Java.

I've tried several other languages since starting Common Lisp (mainly K, Forth and Smalltalk) - CL either provides what other languages do, but cleaner and faster, or (and this is significantly more important!) it lets me provide those features for myself.