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The Early Years: I grew up in a small town of 3500 people. Early on, I 'hung out' with everyone else, but as time passed, and everyone developed, groups formed and I was one of the people "left outside in the cold". That is not to say they treated me poorly; I recognize that in general I was liked by nearly all, but I was not made a part of social gatherings, etc. In some ways it was a good thing because it has made me mentally and emotionally strong. I am a survivor. Also as I got older, school got more boring. It didn't challenge me. I found that I had a natural talent for math, science, and English. The "regular programming" didn't interest me. I also found early on that I was great with computers. I started with an Apple IIe, teaching myself BASIC primarily with some sample programs that came with the used computer. I graduated from that to an 386 clone with a whopping 40 megabyte hard drive. By this time, my stunted my social growth left me more or less an outcast, and I turned to the computer as a substitute. I got into BBS'ing and things related, gathering all kinds of information. I set up my own BBS, but due to lack of funds for my own phone line, I was never able to make it publicly available. As my interest in school waned, so did my grades. My social and academic situation finally changed when I left my home town school and its associated youth to go to college during my 12th grade year in a nearby (read as 1 hour winding drive each way) city. I was able to escape the long-time image of being a geek and a nerd (despite the fact that I began tutoring in the business computer lab at the college <grin>). I ended up moving to that city part way through my second semester (at the age of 17). Two of my new friends and I got a townhouse near the college and had a great time. I still maintain several good friends originating from that time. |
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College This is where the story gets good. After graduating, I enrolled at San Jose State University of California. They primarily took me because of my SAT scores. In my first semester, I showed them why my grades weren't very good - I achieved a grade point average of 0.83. I spent a good portion of the semester on three separate items; Primarily I was on a 486 machine that I bought with limited funding. I was maintaining a private Ethernet network I set up off my machine and an eight-port hub. I got several other people in the dorm hall to buy Ethernet cards and we ran twisted pair cabling through the dorm walls and inside the drop ceilings. We played quite a bit of a variety of networked games. The second item was a part time job as a lab assistant in a math computer lab, which paid for the majority of the network and computer hardware and software. The third item was holding the position of Vice President of the Hall Government for my dorm. After my dismal academic record for my first semester, I was unceremoniously ejected from the alumni of SJSU. However, they have a program called Open University whereby you pay extraordinary amounts of money per unit to take classes regardless of enrollment. I stuck it out for the second semester taking two computer programming courses and a gymnastics course (as I had done gymnastics for five years prior throughout 7th - 11th grade). I also (precariously) maintained my position of Vice President in the residence hall, and continued my previous semesters activities. |
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Beyond College At the end of my second semester at SJSU, I got a part-time job contracting to a small computer hardware company via a contact I made in one of my programming classes. I lived at my grandmothers horse ranch in the hills and spent the summer just making enough to live. At the end of the summer, I got the luckiest break of my professional life. An aunt's friend was interested in hiring teenagers with potential into the well established software company she worked for. After a phone and in-person interview with one of her subordinates, after just turning 19, I was hired full-time into one of the teams. I spent the first six months contracting and working on a variety of small projects. When my supervisor took over the Internationalization Team, I moved with him and took on a high responsibility position that I held for a year, during which I gained invaluable experience in automation, internationalization, and localization. As all good things come to an end, the company let go its entire engineering department at my site, which included me. My long-standing supervisor had a few months before seen it coming and left early. I had already started some side contracting for him, so it was easy to slide into a new position at the new company he was at after taking a week of vacation. In my new position, I started out as a quality assurance (QA) engineer, and over time migrated into a build engineer position. After working as the sole build engineer for over a year, we hired a replacement for me and I again shifted, this time into a true software development position, which is where I still am now. |
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Post-College Over the years after leaving SJSU, I shared a townhouse apartment with several other people for six months, then lived in my car for three months, until finally getting my own apartment by myself. I periodically took night classes after SJSU, occasionally aimed towards a Computer Science degree, but more often they have been merely classes I was interested in taking for fun such as Astronomy and Karate. I trained in Shotokan Karate with the Pacific Coast Karate-Do Club for over three years. Initially I flew threw the ranks, but I reached something of a plateau and I was unable to rekindle my initial enthusiasm plus make time for it. I hope to achieve some more ranks one of these days. In addition to the community college classes, I joined the Western Circle of Swordfighters, a small sword fighting organization and quickly proved my natural abilities in that art. It is a full contact combat art. We practice with boken (unpadded wooden swords) until achieving enough experience at which time we continue our training with steel weapons. I tried a couple other martial arts, but nothing really caught me like the above two. |
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My Life Now Several years ago, my life went through a series of upheavals, both on professional and personal levels, ending with me moving back north to accept a new engineering job. Initially I was not entirely thrilled to leave the city and my comfortable, if small, apartment behind. However, things seem to have worked out quite well, all things considered. Through out all of my life up to this point, I have enjoyed a variety of personal sports; backpacking, camping, rock climbing, rollerblading, mountain biking, SCUBA, surfing, skiing and snowboarding to name a few, plus some of the more cerebral arts as well (which I hope this website is indicative of). |
| That is all of my story for now. If you want to hear more about me, check back every few months and see if I have added more about the recent happenings in my life. |