My Bio

Ah ha! So yer a little curious about who I am, are you? Actually I'm honored that you clicked past the home page.   Well, feel free to read on!

Computer Games
Aquariums		Background
Sports

Well, it was a hobby.  Now it is going to be my career.  I still remember my Dad bringing home the Atari 2600!  What a great system (well for that day and age).  Combat rocked!!  My sister and I would play that thing for hours.  She did better at the fighter jets than I did, but I was better with the tanks.  Oh and who could forget Space Invaders.  Although it got old once I figured out a pattern for completing the levels.

Then came my first home computer, the Commodore VIC-20.  It even came with a nifty tape drive!  I got that beast when I was in the sixth grade.  I started to teach myself Commodore BASIC.  Most of my programs involved text based characters moving around the screen.  Remember the sample program of a man doing jumping jacks?
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  / \
Then late in the seventh grade (I think) I got a Commodore 64.  By now my BASIC skills had improved (I had mastered the PEEK and POKE commands.)  I programmed my first game a couple of months later.  Your character was a block that automatically moved forward and with each step would leave a wall behind it.  The levels were randomly created.  The object of the game was to move your block around the screen and pick up as many bags of gold as possible without running into your own wall or stepping on a land mine.  You simply had to stay alive long enough for the timer to countdown in order to go to the next level.  On each successive level the speed of your character would increase slightly and also the number of land mines increased as well.  The game had sound effects too.  I was pretty proud of it (hey I was in the eighth grade).

Then I was lucky enough to get a chance to take a computer class through school in the eighth grade.  We used Apple IIe's.  I remember playing Karateka before class during lunch (the class was right after lunch).    We did some LOGO work, but the cool part was the final project, which was to make an adventure game.  The teacher recommended to everyone that they do a text-based game.  Most students did simple story type games (you read a paragraph and then chose a direction and would read another paragraph. They hadn't figured out how to use arrays so they could incorporate inventories and the like.) ANYWAY I chose to do a maze adventure game.

After that I stuck with the ole Commodore 64 for a while longer.  I was into Dungeons & Dragons so playing RPG's on the C64 was great.......and then came the NES.    What a great little system, it was so much fun.  When I got to college I got my first IBM compatible computer.  Computing was never the same again.  I lived on that thing (the mighty 25 MHZ 386).  Most programming I did then was for engineering course work (numerical algorithms for solving engineering problems using Pascal and Fortran.)

<--(not a picture of mine unfortunately)
One of my biggest hobbies is being an aquarist.  I've been doing it for a few years now.  Not a lot of time compared to some people, but I would consider myself an intermediate to advanced level hobbyist (for freshwater tanks) based on what I know and what I've been able to do with my tanks.  Unfortunately when I moved up to Washington to attend DigiPen, I had to shut down the tanks.  I don't have the time to take care of them (or enjoy them,) plus I couldn't afford an apartment large enough to fit the tanks in anyways.

I had three tanks a 10, 40, and a 50-gallon tank.  The ten gallon was used primarily as a quarantine/hospital tank.  I kept African Cichlids in the 40-gal, and the 50-gallon was a planted community tank.

I love the hobby!  It is really cool because you learn about biology, chemistry, lighting, physics, fluid dynamics, and botany to name a few things.  At least that's what I get out of the hobby.  Many people just throw some fish in a bowl and call themselves fish keepers.  I on the other hand enjoy learning new things so I enjoyed the hobby on a different level.

I won't try and give you a bunch of hints and tips for the hobby, but if you would like some then go to my links page and check some out.  I learned about 60% of what I know about fish keeping from reading countless pages from the web, participating in discussion groups, and scanning the newsgroups.  There is a wealth of reliable knowledge out there. Check the sites out if you're interested, you won't be sorry.

Click here for a snapshot of my first planted tank (I replanted the tank a year later when I switched to underground heating cables) and at that time I also changed the plant types and arrangement.  Please forgive the quality of the photo; I didn't have an SLR camera at the time so the shot isn't the greatest (especially since it looks like the tank is tipping over.)  I just wish I had taken a picture of the last tank before I had to shut it down when I moved.

Background

Napa is a nice place to raise a family.  Good school system, good community youth programs (sports, etc.), small enough to avoid big city problems of crime/violence/gangs, and yet big enough to have more than one book in the library.  After you graduate from high school the best thing, IMHO, is to leave town and expand your horizons.  Unless you like small town evenings (read nothing to do at night.)

I attended Vintage High School, which is one of the three high schools in Napa.  It is the best high school in Napa though. ;)

Besides taking the standard college prep courses, I was heavy into sports (track, soccer, diving, basketball) and heavy into music.  In fact, for a while I seriously considered a career in music (vocal performance).  I was involved with five different choral groups.  I must say it was one of the best times I ever had in my life.  When I started to apply to colleges, though, I had to make a decision on what I wanted to major in.  My two loves were singing and engineering.  I figured that I wasn't going to be the next Pavarotti, so I chose mechanical engineering.

I ended up deciding to attend Santa Clara University, which I found by accident.  When I was a junior in high school I took a college search trip with my mother.  We had laid out a course from Napa all the way down to San Diego marking about 9 colleges along the way.  When we were driving through San Jose my mother said, "Oh look there's the Santa Clara University campus."  All I knew was that Paramount's Great America amusement park was nearby.  Well after a couple of tours and an overnight stay with some students, it was my first choice (Cal Poly SLO was my second choice  BTW.)

After college I worked for a small company called Paramit Corporation.  The company was a contract manufacturer of printed circuit board assemblies.  I started out as a Process Engineer and over the course of four years worked my way up to Manufacturing Engineering Manager.  It was an incredible experience; I was very lucky to land a job like that right out of college.  My employers were great.  They were more mentors than bosses.  I refer to them in the plural sense since I feel that I always had more than one boss at Paramit.  I had as much responsibility as I could handle, I was allowed to create my own projects (based on current company directions), I interfaced with customers, etc. etc.  Being a small company (25 office people with 175 shop floor workers) I was involved with many aspects of the company: human resources, financials, capital acquisitions, new business, new manufacturing technologies, current process improvements, ISO 9000, you name it.

Although I enjoyed working at Paramit, I couldn't see myself doing that type of work for the rest of my life.  That's when DigiPen came into my life.