WHERE DID YOU GROW UP? WHAT WAS YOUR PATH TO CAL? I spent most of my pre-college life growing up in Orange County, primarily in Mission Viejo, recently ranked the safest city of its size in the country: in short, I lived in the bubble inside the bubble. Luckily I got out of it a decent amount and didn't get too jaded by the heavy materialism that pervades in the place. I had done a fairly good amount of programming in high school (see below), was involved with the robotics competition in Science Olympiad, and was a techie in several respects for my high school. I was pretty sure that CS and/or EE was the route I wanted to take. In the end I was deciding between UCLA, Berkeley, and Harvey Mudd. I was concerned that Berkeley might be too impersonal and I wouldn't get the same kind of education as one would at a small school like Harvey Mudd. It was actually going to Dan's research group meeting that swayed the decision for me, where I saw that you can have really good interaction with the faculty if you seek it out. HOW MUCH PROGRAMMING HAVE YOU DONE (& WHAT LANGUAGES) Pre-College: I started programming in middle school with HTML and Javascript. In my freshman year of high school I progressed to the whatever language is on the TI-83 calculators and was the guy who made a program for every concept in math class. I picked up Java on my own time around sophomore year of high school and essentially taught myself AP CS AB senior year of high school with a few friends. I also picked up some PHP & MySQL skills while building my high school's website. College: Freshman year of college I joined GamesCrafters (Dan's combinatorial game theory research group), where I picked up C and programmed Tile Chess. The hash for the game still gives me nightmares. Sophomore year I programmed a Static Evaluator framework for the group, which tries to tell you the best way to play any game from any position (once configured for that game). I learned Verilog in CS150, a bit of Matlab in some EE courses, and somewhere along the way I picked up Python. I've also worked at Microsoft for the past two summers, where I programmed in C#. While I think Python is great for small to medium sized projects, I don't think it scales well, and I would use C# hands down for any decently large project. WHAT ARE YOUR HOBBIES I enjoy dancing (mostly swing), juggling, programming, web design, getting to know people, chess, reading sci-fi books, trying to reconcile science and faith, ice blocking, and building random things. Some past projects include: a robotic pumpkin head (more specifically, a cylon head with the strobing LED eye strip), a video projector made out of an LCD screen and an overhead projector, and some small robots. I used to do martial arts (a mixture of shaolin, kempo, and jiu-jitsu), sailing, and hiking - I hope to be able to get back into those at some point. WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR TALENTS & SKILLS I have done one swing dancing performance, and I'll be doing a few more this semester. I've been dancing for a year now, and I'm really trying to improve as much as possible. I can only juggle 3 balls by myself, but more with a partner. =) Similar to Dave, I would also bet a free lunch that I can beat anyone in this class at Super Smash Brothers (64 - the only version worth mentioning). HAVE YOU DONE ANYTHING REMARKABLE? HAS ANYTHING MEMORABLE HAPPENED TO YOU? I've climbed to the top of Mt. St. Helens - it has a pretty remarkable view and imagining the incredible force which blew out the massive crater in front of you as well as the now non-existent 2000 feet of mountain above you is pretty awe-inspiring. During the last summer I got to visit Bill Gates' house, shake his hand, and briefly talk to him. He's actually a pretty cool guy - really down to earth, and even while being barraged with questions by tons of interns trying to sound intelligent in front of him, he did a really good job of answering questions, giving little tidbits of insight, and showing what he was passionate and excited about. WHAT COMMITMENTS WILL BE CONSUMING YOUR CYCLES THIS SEMESTER? Besides TAing for this course, I will be teaching SwingCal, the swing dancing DeCal, and organizing a lot of swing dancing events on campus. I'll be doing two fairly intense project classes (Mechatronic Design Laboratory and Embedded Systems) and a modern philosophy class. Robotics is what I've thought I wanted to do since high school, so this semester will hopefully be the one in which I determine if I'm sticking with robotics and if I'm going to continue with EE classes. Towards that end I will also be involved with the Cal RoboCup team. Seeing as this is our first semester of existence, we will have quite a time trying to get ourselves from nothing to a (hopefully) functional team of robots by the end of the semester. I am also revamping the website for a ministry I'm involved with. If I have any free cycles after that, I'll see what I can do about creating some random Facebook apps and maybe a few small robots. But know that 61C comes before a lot of the other stuff. I loved this course when I took it, and I'm going to do my best to make you feel the same way! =)