About
A short history of my life -- and a rather dry telling. If you want something interesting, you'll have to drop me a line. :)
I grew up in a small town called Kensington, which is in the the San Francisco Bay Area near Berkeley and Richmond. Everything before high school is a bit of a blur so I'll just skip right to it (but if I'm supposed to remember you, don't worry, I do). I attended El Cerrito High School where I spent most of my time participating in the speech and debate club. In particular, I had a reasonably successful policy (team) debate career on the national circuit, making it to outrounds at tournaments like Berkeley, Stanford, Greenhill, and USC, winning a couple speaker awards (including a top speaker at Alta, which I am convinced was just extremely good luck), and attending the Tournament of Champions. I wasn't stellar but had the privledge of debating with (and against) someone that was (you know who you are), and generally had much fun traveling all over the country. The months spent at Stanford and Dartmouth Debate institutes were happy (albeit grueling) times also.
When I graduated in 1999, I went on to obtain a bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley where I decided I needed a change of pace and got into computers rather than political science. Unfortunately (in a sense), I didn't lose the insane work-ethic I picked up from debating and became a computer geek faster than is probably healthy. So I worked too hard, didn't play as much as I would have liked, and graduated at the top of my major in the spring of 2003. During the process, I did a small stint as an intern at Sun Microsystems and became a code-monkey (i.e., researcher) with the Optical and OceanStore groups at Berkeley. But that's all documented elsewhere on this website. Although it sounds a bit dull, I actually had many good times, made some good friends, and kept many old ones. Much credit to the Computer Science Honor Society (which I was an officer of for way too long) for planning and holding great events, none of which had anything to do with computer science. :)
And that just about brings me to the present, where I am a graduate student in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon. I plan to enjoy my (hopefully not too long) stay here as well.
As to me as a person, my likes, dislikes, etc., you can try to decode what you can from my set of links and photos.
Last modified: Fri Jan 18 16:03:44 EST 2008