WHERE DID YOU GROW UP? WHAT WAS YOUR PATH TO CAL?

I grew up all around the Bay Area. My family moved a lot and I ended up
living in a lot of the cities in the Bay Area at one time or another. I
went to High School in San Ramon at, appropriately enough, San Ramon High
School. That was where I really got into Computer Science for the first
time. Prior to High School I hadn't really used computers at all. But I
took a beginning programming class in High School and fell in love with
computers.

Even though I fell in love with my computer programming courses, by my
final year of High School I had stopped caring about all of my other
classes. Even my math classes (which I had always enjoyed before), were no
longer interesting. Due to this I barely graduated from High School, and
had no desire to go college. My parents were not happy about this, but
they couldn't make me want to do anything. So I ended up attending a
community college, but during my first semester I only took a single
class. And yes, it was a CS class.

For a few years I continued to take classes at the community college, but
only CS and System Administration courses. I had little desire to earn a
degree, and even less desire to transfer to a four-year college, so I
ignored all the general education courses needed. This along with not
being able to decide between CS and System Administration as a focus meant
that I spent a lot of years at my community college without moving towards
a degree or transferring.

Eventually I decided to leave community college to join the workforce. At
the time I had been an intern for a year with the same group, and I chose
to continue with them as a contractor. This proved to be an ill-timed
endeavor as it was just before the economic crash in 2001. I ended up out
of a job, and not enrolled in school. I languished in unemployment for a
year before deciding to re-enroll at my community college to finish an
Associates Degree in CS.

Working to finish my Associates Degree led me to rediscover my passion for
learning, and for math in particular. With a renewed interest in expanding
my horizons I decided that I wasn't happy with just an Associates Degree,
and began planning to transfer to a four-year college. Choosing Cal as my
destination was easy. I decided to take advantage of the concurrent
enrollment program to take a course at Cal while still enrolled at my
community college, and I fell in love with the campus and the curriculum.
Luckily I managed to get admitted to Cal, and haven't looked back since.


HOW MUCH PROGRAMMING HAVE YOU DONE (& WHAT LANGUAGES)

I've done a lot of programming in a lot of different languages. I usually
can't remember them all, but I'll give it a shot. I've used: GWBASIC,
Turbo Pascal, QBASIC, 8086 Assembly, C, C++, Borland C++Builder, Java,
Scheme, MIPS Assembly, Python, Visual Basic, VBA, and SQL. I may be
forgetting one or two somewhere in there, but those are the ones that I
have the most experience with.


WHAT ARE YOUR HOBBIES

My hobbies include computers, video games, and radio control cars (the
actual build-it-from-a-kit kind, not the cheap kind).


WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR TALENTS & SKILLS

I don't have any remarkable talents or skills really. My parents think I'm
a master of learning useless trivia, but I've certainly known people who
were better than me.


HAVE YOU DONE ANYTHING REMARKABLE? HAS ANYTHING MEMORABLE HAPPENED TO YOU?

I got accepted to UC Berkeley.


WHAT COMMITMENTS WILL BE CONSUMING YOUR CYCLES THIS SEMESTER?

Being a first-time TA for CS61C is probably my biggest challenge this
semester. As such I intend to devote a fairly large amount of my time to
it. However, this is my last semester at Berkeley, so I will have to
ensure that I pass my remaining courses, which include CS 184 and Math
128B. I am also a member of Dan's GamesCrafters group, and I intend to
take on a larger project than normal in that group for my final semester.
All in all I'll have a lot of projects this semester (both CS 184 and Math
128B are shaping up to have large end-of-semester projects), but I'm
looking forward to learning from all of them. Especially the project of
being a TA, since that one will involve learning things that will extend
far beyond the classroom.